A Seed In The Wind

9781617922848

Chapter 1:  The Power of Zero

It was snowing in them big fluffy flakes at Ermineskin Indian Residential School in the middle of November 1963. The snow was coming down in huge, thick, white flakes in a sunless gray afternoon, like flakes of laundry soap being poured into a plain gray enamel pail. Phyllistine thought to herself, Geez, even the snow is big and white!  And then she thought of this saying, pure as the driven snow. Why did white people get all the breaks in life? Did God give them all these breaks? Was God really that unjust? She reasoned, "He couldn’t be that unjust…why just look at me…I look like some Injun princess outta some Old West postcard. I am beautiful…even if it’s my opinion…it’s only my opinion that counts in my life anyway. What more in life do I want? I got long, beautiful, shiny, black hair past my waist, I got the face and body of a high fashion model from wunna them cover girl ads and the brains of a UN Secretary…what more does I wants outta life, as my dad would say with his University of Reader’s Digest degree of self learning?

Her dad didn’t really look like any of the movie stars in her magazines, but she decided that he had to look like Sitting Bull even though she had never seen a picture of Sitting Bull. To her, that was better than looking like the King of England…pictures of whom she had seen. Her mom looked like a someone who had been a princess two centuries ago. She reminded Phyllistine of a preserved Egyptian mummie. Phyllistine just knew that she was never going to be overweight or have white hair or have a wrinkled face-off. Oh, Mother! Where did your beauty go? Why, to the wrinkle bin, of course!

It was the long recess and the drabness of life after lunch hour and some of the kids were throwing snowballs in the schoolyard just for something to do on a do-nothing kind of a day.  Phyllistine and her friend, Charlene, were standing at the junior high school doorway trying too hard to look as cool as possible without looking cold (to the guys because no one else mattered).

Phyllistine and Charlene called each other Missus. They were each fourteen whole years old and they both knew everything there was to know in the whole world...needless to say, (their world was so small). It consisted of Injun reservation life in Hobbema, Alberta, Canada and that was it. It was unexciting poverty, irrelevant statistics and an extremely boring lifestyle. One day was as sad and as unexciting as the next…They were so boringly poor, or such poor bores. She often thought of being in the world of Life Magazine, but she could only daydream about it because she couldn’t even afford to buy the magazine, let alone live the life that was inside. She wondered what it would be like to live in a house like that, to drive a car like that, to wear clothes like that. Her real world was not the magazine world, though. She had to stick to the facts of life, to the ragazines of Injun reservation life.

But something had to keep her going. Phyllistine was a knock-out and she knew it, and what's worse, she acted like she knew it. Missus, herself,  wasn’t too awful bad, as she had once described herself.  They each had a Number 7 cigarette to puff on in the freezing November air, thanks to Phyllistine, who always brought all the cigarettes to school.  She always remembered to steal off her mom or her dad or her brother or her sister or her Kokum.  Somebody always managed to have cigarettes and they wouldn’t miss a couple uvvum, especially if Phyllistine was a clever thief and stole only one here and there. They wouldn’t miss ‘em. She never saw any of them counting their cigarettes and taking smokes inventory. No chance of getting caught if they couldn’t even remember how many cigarettes they smoked in one day! She was safe from stolen cigarettes suspicion. Yyyyep, she off the suspects list because she wasn’t even on it in the first place! She felt smug about her place in life.

Missus’ mom didn’t smoke and her dad only smoked when he was drunk. Probly was too drunk to figure out if it was the alcohol or the cigarettes that made him sick. Maybe it was both, but Phyllistine couldn’t care less. After all, his drinking wasn’t her problem.

This kind of smoking in the snowy weather always made Phyllistine kinda sick to her stomach but she pretended that it didn’t  bother her…she was cool…and pretending not to be ghastly ill was a part of being cool…she guessed.   Deep down inside, she also knew that it made her breath smell pretty horrible…like  an extremely stale cigarette mixed with plaque and old food particles in a smelly cocktail…quite the mixture…but she was cool, so she smiled through it all.  But, man, she wanted to throw up! This kind of pretending  to be cool took up a lot of energy and a lot of good health, she noticed. She never realized that being cool was ever gonna be this hard. It wasn't exactly easy to pretend to be not getting sick when you were getting sick and you wanted to puke all over the place...but not right in front of all these people! Not in front of all her friends and all those enemies that she had to show off in front of. What would they think of her? That she was a pukey punk and not a cool puffer? She was a beautiful girl being all cool and stuff, just puffing away in the school yard.

Then she saw the dreamboat of the school, Gabriel, come walking over towards where her and Missus were standing  He was walking with two girls and they were all teasing each other by gently pushing and shoving and laughing all the while.  Then he stopped in front of Phyllistine.  He squished a snowball in her face without warning.

Hey, what didja do that for? she falsely complained.  Her heart was actually racing because she had never talked to him before in her life and he looked so beautiful up close. She daydreamed about talking to this dreamboat so many times in her life that she had an electric shock moment. She felt millions of tiny little electricity bumps all over…and it didn’t seem like they were all coming from the cold weather. Man, she left corny, even though she knew that she was what the schoolkids called a knockout, but her self-image was a little low on gas, because he was the knockout of the male world and he took her breath away.

She lied to herself, it was such an easy thing to do these days. If she could lie to herself successfully, then she could lie to anyone successfully.  It made sense to her.  She told herself that she was running outta breath because it was too damn cold outside. She couldn’t really explain away her beating heart so easily though. Snowy weather doesn’t exactly cause heart beats like the one she was having right now! Man, she was having herself a secret heart attack. She was desperately hoping that he wouldn't hear her heart beating for him, it was so goddamn loud. That would definitely not be cool! Her heart was racing microphone loud and that was not cool.

"Just to rub off  some of your eye make up!" he teased with a big smile.

Well, ain’t you the pompous make-up artist! she shouted, trying her darnest to hide her trembling voice just so she could continue to sound ‘cool’. Even she knew that a shaky voice was not cool, especially in the great presence of the school dreamboat. He even had a dreamboat voice and a dreamboat smile…and get a grip…get yourself outta the gutter!

How could I be a make-up artist when I think you look so much better without make-up…that’s  why I rubbed it all off! he replied smugly. Wanna go for a walk?  He started to walk away without even waiting for her to answer, he was used to being followed by a dozen girls. He just kept on smiling at her…taking her with him with his smile. He knew she would follow, like they all did.

Well, she’d teach this son-of-a-pompous-so-and-so some manners.  Man, she could not believe how pompous he was!  No thanks,  she false-proudly said. I hafta finish my cigarette. I wouldn’t wanna waste what I have left just to waste my time doing what every other girl does.

Go ahead. Be my guest. Have your cigarette. Have your bad breath.  Maybe you could breathe on Miss Eggbert in class and knock her out flat.  That way, classes would be cancelled for the afternoon and everyone would be thanking you for the huge favor.  He mockingly laughed and went way out into the schoolyard. 

Phyllistine stood there feeling stupid and ridiculed and rejected and secretly fuming but she was ‘cool’.  Her face did not show any of these feelings.  She only knew how to show open defiance…real good.  She hoped that he would turn around to check on her dejection.  He did. She seized the opportunity. She took a huge drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke ever-so-obviously his way.  He shook his head and smiled and turned around to keep walking. He had to show her that he wasn’t the least bit dejected that she would rather spend time smoking a cigarette.  His attitude told her, Go ahead and have your bad breath! Who needs girls with cigarette breath and a yellow smile? What he really meant was, "Who kisses girls with cigarette breath and a yellow smile?"

Man, she felt angry and stupid and rejected and excited all at the same time.  She couldn’t keep up with her racing feelings. She wanted to kiss him and slap his insulting face at the same time.  Creep! Heartbeat! Creep! Heartbeat! Kinda hard to do both.  Kinda impossible, isn’t it?  It’s got to be one or the other!  She couldn’t let his arrogance win, though. But she still could not believe how beautiful he was!  He had thick brown hair with red highlights.  He had the most gorgeous hazel-green eyes she had ever seen.  She could see in his eyes that he had ancestors who must have intermarried with white people…after all, green eyes and red highlights weren’t exactly Injun heredity material. But she was just as beautiful herself. Many people had already told her that she looked like an Indian princess (whatever that is). She knew she was beautiful deep down inside. That’s what the mirror told her, but her self-image told her something else: that she wasn’t good enough, that she wasn’t pretty enough, that she wasn’t tall enough, that she wasn’t slim enough (even though she weighed all of 110 pounds!). She had heard some of the kids in the schoolyard gossiping about Gabriel’s coloring long before the moment she had ever met him. They said he looked like a white kid and that he didn’t belong in an Injun school.

Hey, Missus, can you believe that Gabriel just came over to talk to me? Me, me, me?

"Yeah, I can believe it Missus. Now, look at you. You got them stars in your eyes. You’re all Gabrielized."

Shut up, Missus. You’re just jealous, Phyllistine teased. You know some kids are saying that Gabriel is a white kid and that he doesn’t belong on the reserve. They said their parents were saying that each generation on the reserve was beginning to look more and more white and that he looks like a white guy. Phyllistine pronounced her edict now, I don’t give a damn if Gabriel is a little green man from Mars living on the reserve. I love him and that’s all that counts. These kids don’t got anything better to do than to knock someone around who is better looking than they are. They have to make a racial issue out of it. Let ‘em talk…I’m gonna daydream…I love him even though he is a pompous ass, part white and part Injun. Besides, my dad had told me that there ain’t no FBI (full-blooded Injun) left in this world.  Everyone is a mixed-blood these days in North America. In his amateur philosophy, he had said, ‘Dey is peanut butter and whipped cream sandwiches.’ Some people call um halfbreeds, some call um mixed bloods. Others call um Metis. Man, I don’t care. I just know that my world wouldn’t turn without Gabriel in it. The blood in his veins doesn’t matter to me. Only the blood in my veins matters to me and that is pretty well all that counts."

You sure have a simple way of looking at life, Missus replied.

What other way is there when you are in love? Phyllistine remained defiant.

Just looking at Gabriel almost knocked her over. It made her want to lie down and die of love. It took her breath away. It made her heart beat ridiculously fast. She kept feeling like she was gonna lose her balance and her breath at any time and get dizzy and look drunk when she was talking to him and just plain faint!   She had to act real cool just to keep her footing intact and still look calm about it all without looking all ridiculous and dizzy and off-balance…like she felt.  Now, that was a mental juggling act that she almost lost on several split-second occasions. She almost keeled over several times. It took all the mental energy she had just to keep her balance. Her anger at his arrogance was not an obvious forest fire. It was seething hot coals under a façade of piled up gray ashes. When she looked at him in the face, her eyes showed dancing fires in a cold dark night, but her heart was a smouldering coal under the perfect camouflage of the cold, gray ashes. He made her feel all the glamour of a collapsing lawn chair, even though she tried to look and act like Cleopatra.

Acting ‘cool’ was the all-important yardstick. The all-important crutch to hang onto in times of feeling out-of-control and stupid…like a lifelessly-dangling marionette…looking all mangled and floppy and pathetic. It didn’t matter if she had all the grace of a pathetic marionette…she just wanted to dance and dance to the imaginary music that he had put in her butterfly-dancing heart.

She noticed how good he looked in his Levis.  She was probably not the only girl who noticed that he wore a pair of Levis like the way they should he worn…like the way they looked in the bluejean billboards at Edmonton on Calgary Trail.  She felt kinda happy. No, wait, she was really, really happy…no, no, wait! She wanted to scream it all out at the top of the highest mountain: She was downright ecstatic!

They made a good pair, her and Gabriel.  She wore a pair of Levis the way they should be worn, too!  She knew that she looked fantastic in blue jeans…so did he…he was definitely her male counterpart in the sexy bluejeans department.  He walked like he was slowly dragging the whole world of girls with him…with all the females looking longingly at his long-legged-Levis.  He knew he looked fantastic.  Pompous male counterpart of a female dog!  But she already loved his smile.  It lit up her world. It made sparks come into her heart and fly all around her.  She imagined that they would look good together.  They were both young and beautiful, but he sure needed some lessons in the humble pie department….come to think of it, so did she…but, of course, she never thought of it that way, she was, after all, perfect! She didn’t care that she was vacillating between being perfect and being not good enough, that she was teetering on the brink of insanity. She just knew that he drove her crazy and she lived every breath just to see him again. She was riding the merry-go-round of love and it was making her dizzy!

All she could think of all afternoon in class was him.  She relived that same movie moment over an over again like it was some kinda sacred memory, or repeated heart throb, depending on which way you looked at it.  She kept on pressing her mental replay button.  She never wanted to shut the mental movie off. She kept on feeling his presence over and over and over and she would still get that same sensation every time she relived the moment.  It was probably one of those magic moments that people always talk about. She never thought that she would ever be lucky enough to experience one of these once-in-a-lifetime moments that made you happy for the rest of your life. 

She couldn’t wait to see him again.  Whenever she thought about talking to him, her heart would go all whacky and increase its pace and race to the moon and back all in one exciting second.  His voice became her mantra.  She could see his face in her mind all afternoon.  She was his eternal portrait photographer. She smiled and smiled at a seemingly faraway nothing all afternoon.  When class was finally over for the afternoon short recess, she ran outside and searched for him in a million different directions all at once.  She searched frantically with her eyes all over the schoolyard but she couldn’t see him anywhere.  She wanted to suddenly burst into tears. She had already learned the first lesson of love: this world is downright depressing without the one you love in it. Her heart sank to the ground and became absorbed in its misery. Tears started to contour her eyes like a liquid pencil and she could feel the redness starting to sting her eyes into the pain of sobbing her heart out.

Then she felt a head on her shoulder…a face breathing into her hair. He whispered to her, Looking for somebody?

Yes, you, she heard herself confessing…now that there were no witnesses to the truth…the truth being that she was ‘uncool’.  She decided to tell him how she felt as truthfully as she could.  I think you’re beautiful, she confessed.

"Oh, I know I’m beautiful. You don’t have to tell me. I think you’re beautiful, too," he said simply.

She believed him.  She knew it was true.  She looked deeply into his eyes and she felt herself disappearing into paradise and integrating with it.  She saw love.  She felt love. She let herself fall. She fell into that place where falling feels so exhiliarating that you never want to stop falling into a bottomless space of forever.

He was all she thought about all day and all night for the next three years that she went steady with him. When students went steady at Ermineskin School, it meant that they were only going out with each other and with no one else. It seemed like a demarcation of  love territory, because all other prospects were off-limits until the ‘going steady’ signs were all turned off. She wanted to know everything about him…when was he born, where was he born?  How many brothers and sisters did he have?  Did he have a Kokum and Mosom?  What did his house look like?  Which reserve did he live at? What did his bedroom look like?  Did he have a dog?  If so, what was his dog’s name?  Did he ever have any other girlfriends?  What were their names? What were his parents’ names? Where did he live? What time did he hafta grab the bus in the morning?  What time did he get home from school? What did he wanna be when he got outta school? What did he eat for breakfast? Did he eat anything at all? Did he have any idea, any idea at all, how beautiful he is and how deeply she had fallen in love with him?  Of course he did, stupid ass! The stars in her eyes were so blindingly obvious.

They walked way out into the schoolyard, to the edge of the outer limits.  The outer limits were what the kids called the way at the edge of the schoolyard…any further and you’d be in trouble for going out of the school boundaries. Them was the control lines and they was named after the TV show. That was where the colonial power of the nuns and the priests who ran the school ended.  All power at Ermineskin School ended at them control lines. The power of the parents and the grandparents and the Band Council ruled from there…for all Phyllistine knew or cared, the power of the Universe ruled everything…Then they turned to face each other.  She had one of those feelings or intuitions where you do or die. She prayed real quickly and haphazardly because she had no time for a real long or slow prayer and she forced herself to blurt out the truth the best she could do:  I think I fell in love with you.

He didn’t laugh like the way she had expected him to in her most horrendously insecure moments.  She had rehearsed this moment over and over again in her mind with a thousand different scenarios all the way up and down the emotional spectrum from total acceptance by him to total rejection.  But she took her chances.  It was do or die time. She decided to die if he didn’t love her, too.

I think I love you, too.

Them was the magic words that had been too good to be true. She looked up at him and she smiled her realest smile. She knew it was real because she felt a thousand electrical signals turning into birds in her heart and flying out freely into the Universe. She wanted to take him into her arms and hold him forever but she couldn’t.  The teachers would probably put her in detention for kissing and hugging a guy in the schoolyard.  You got detention for showing love at Ermineskin School. You also got a strap if you dared to speak Cree. So just to stay out of trouble, she talked and thought and breathed English. She had enough problems in her life without creating new ones for herself, so she didn’t go speaking Cree when them teachers and nuns and priests had such long necks and long noses to go with them. She couldn’t kiss Gabriel either without risking a strap, so she told hm instead and she laughed all the way through it, "If I could, I would kiss you right in this schoolyard the way that Clark Gable kissed Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind…but we can’t. They’d throw us outta this school and we would not be able to see each other, at least not for a awhile. You know, somebody somewhere once said that ‘eyes are the windows of the soul,’ so I’ll just look into your eyes and tell you I will put my world straight into your soul. My heart is yours. I only live to love you. I think about you all the time."

Well, I ain’t Clark Gable but I gratefully accept your love, Scarlett, he smiled.

She didn’t tease back, instead, she chose to tell him how she felt as she was feeling it, I wish I could just take you into my arms and kiss you right here and now and never let you go until we reach the end of forever.  She could tell that he was feeling the same thing. 

She read it in his eyes.  It was the truth.  The beautiful, simple truth…the kind that you just know and that’s all.  He became her whole world.  She allowed him to become her whole  world. She gave him her heart…the whole meaning of her life.  She loved him so truthfully, so naturally…like a river flows naturally over the land and sunlight touches the earth.  All she could think of was him when they weren’t together at school.  She had continuous fantasies about doing things with him.  At her age, they were all innocent fantasies…like going for a walk in a deep green forest and riding horses all over the reserve on the weekend. 

She thought about him from the moment she woke up in the morning until at night when she was trying to go to sleep.  She would see his face and look into his eyes and drift off to sleep. He made the whole miserable winter something that she could stand. Life wasn’t too grandiose at home with her dad drinking so much and her mom having her silent misery spells because of their poverty. School was a great escape. It was even greater now because of his presence there. He was definitely a good incentive never to miss a day of school. She didn’t wanna miss a day of seeing him.  She didn’t give a damn about the classes or about them colonialists who ran the school. If it wasn’t Indian Affairs colonialists, it was Roman Catholic colonialists. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference to her. A colonialist is a colonialist is a colonialist. Didn’t matter if they claimed to be saviors, economically or spiritually. They all claimed that they were better than us. There was them and us and that was it. It didn’t make a difference to anyone’s life on the reserve if they were wearing a business suit or a nun’s habit. They were all wolves in sheep’s clothing as far as her and her parents were concerned. The nuns stuck their nose up at the pagan ways and the Injun Affairs people stuck their nose up at the poverty while they added more whipped cream to their federal pension benefits.

Her and Gabriel both hated ‘the system’ of residential schools and Injun Affairs bureaucracies. They had to live with their ineptitude the same way that their parents and grandparents did. Things just never seemed to change on the reservation. If it wasn’t one repressive system, it was another. The kids mostly cigaretted everything away.

He had told her his first big secret one day in the schoolyard: he smoked like she did…but only while he was drunk on weekends. Drunk on weekends? You mean you drink on weekends? she had asked him. At the most awkward moment, she thought about Missus’ dad who only smoked while he was drunk. Was Gabriel already turning out like Missus’ dad?  She tried to carry on a sober conversation about this alcoholic confession, Who do you drink with?

My cousin, Brad, he is about ten years older than me and he always comes to pick me up with his winking Ford on weekends to go around drinking with him, he had said. He was all of fifteen years old and had already built-up a weekend tolerance level to alcohol.

What do you do besides get drunk on weekends? she had asked.

Oh, different things…go to town…go to parties… he seemed bored by the whole way of life…like there was nothing to look forward to.

Do you want to quit drinking sometimes? she asked.

Yes, getting drunk every weekend gets boring after awhile, he answered half-heartedly.

"Well, why don’t you just quit?  I don’t drink. It doesn’t kill me not to drink," she offered, kind of sheepishly.

Don’t lecture me about drinking…I’ve heard every goddamn lecture that there is about alcohol and none of them have ever worked for me.  People don’t quit drinking on lectures. I just know that I don’t like it anymore. I don’t think that I ever did.  I just pretended that I did…like you pretend to like smoking cigarettes when they really make you sick.  Like that. I pretend to be cool when I’m drinking because I have to pretend to be cool because I’m not really cool and drinking makes me have phony fun. Get it?  No, of course, you don’t…how could you get it when you don’t even drink? How could you know that your body becomes a slave to alcohol after awhile and it tells you that you gotta go out and get drunk all over again and you are so powerless to control your own life, he stopped here. He had said enough because she was very quiet. She was beginning to look at him like he was from outer space. He needed to give her some time to grasp the information of this thorny walk that he had just taken her on…to take it into her mind and to understand it…if she or anyone else but an alcoholic ever could.

After a long pause, he told her that he knew that she gets bad breath from cigarettes because he does too from cigarettes and alcohol. He thought it might make her feel a little bit better. He felt suddenly compassionate and tender. Don’t ever drink, OK? You’ll end up in the same hell that I’m in or worst still, you’ll end up in jail or in the hospital or dead in some morgue, he had warned her.  I care about you too much to see you there at any of those places. I don’t even want to see you in a bar, let alone a jail!. End of story.

"Gee, I’m insulted…you mean, you just care about me? Does that mean you don’t love me? You just care about me?"

I love you, alright? But I shouldn’t hafta say it until you become old like a bannock face, he teased her insulted character.

She laughed, Alright, I’ll accept that you don’t hafta say it anymore when you have an old, creviced bannock mouth, like toothless Popeye puckering up for a kiss from Olive Oil. She took her Olive position and mocked the toothless Popeye and laughed.

All the rest of that school year, Phyllistine and Gabriel were in puppy love heaven. Every school morning, they would meet at Ermineskin School right after the school buses got there and they would exchange love letters. They would fold up the letters in half and then again in another half and another half until the letters were only about two inches by two inches. They would secretly pass them to each other as soon as they saw each other in the mornings at school right after they got off the schoolbus. It had to be secret so that none of the teachers would see them and immediately confiscate them and read them in class. He held her hand boldly (to ward off the self proclaimed power of the ‘supervisors’ outside the school buses). He put his carefully folded love letter in her hand without being seen by the all-seers. Then she secretly took out her letter and quickly put it in his hand.  They exchanged love letters like this every morning without being seen: from his inside pocket to his hand to her hand.  From her inside pocket to her hand to his hand.  That was their secret postal system away from the eyes of the all-seers. They had to hide from them colonial eyes.

Those damn teachers would always read any confiscated love letters out loud to the whole class and then all the kids would laugh their guts out and hold their hearts and say mockingly breathlessly, Oh Henry, I love you so much. It would be kind of disastrous if they did manage to get their cesspool minds and filthy fingers on these letters. They would take this risk and write to each other and in those letters, they would  tell each other their most intimate feelings:

Dear Gabriel,

My dad never came home again last night. My mom smoked and smoked at the window by the  kitchen table waiting for him to come home. I fell asleep thinking of being married to you and having your kids and living in a house and living happily ever after. Then my dad came home in the middle of the night and started cooking something gross-smelling and he stunk up and smoked up the kitchen and swore whenever he dropped the frying pan on the floor. He swore at my mom for not cooking for him in the middle of the night. I heard him slapping her on the face and she screamed and cried and told him that he was a no-good, hopeless drunk and that she was sorry that she ever had to marry him. I have heard this same argument between them at least a hundred times. It always starts the same and it always ends the same. My dad ends up crying and feeling sorry for himself and listening to that wino country and western music to soothe his drunken soul. All the while, I shut out their same old argument with my mind. I think about you. I think about your beautiful eyes. You make this world so worth it to live in. I look forward to seeing you, to listening to you breath, to adoring every movement you make. You are the magic of my life. You are the Prince Charming of my Sleeping Beauty. I thank God every night for sending you to me so that I can love you when the rest of my life is so unbearable. My Kokum sleeps on her single bed beside us. She asked me what I was doing when I was imagining writing this letter and thinking about what I was gonna write. I lied to her, as usual, but she always knows when I’m lying anyway. She’s a human radar screen for lies. I told her that I was thinking about the snowflakes falling outside. She asked me if I wanted to hear what the traditional people said about snowflakes, so I said OK, just to pass the boring time. She told me that each snowflake is different than any snowflake that has ever fallen on earth. She said that in that way, snowflakes are like people, everyone is different. She said that snowflakes come to teach human beings about the  patience of The Creator…that He has the patience to create every person differently and that His creation is great. There has been snow falling since the beginning of time and it is still falling and each snowflake is entirely different in its pattern than the last. She said a person can imagine the breath and the depth of God’s patience when you think about all the snowflakes that have fallen on earth since the beginning of time. That is how great He is. Anyway, I better quit blabbing or babbling. Did Mr. Holland ever tell you to improve your English by reading the reference books out loud? He did that to me and he said that he did that to other kids at school, too. Isn’t he cool? See you at school tomorrow. P.S. I love you, snowflake.

Then, the next day, Gabriel would answer her letter:

Dear Phyllistine,

I love you, too. The grass in my world turns green for you. You make all of my sunrises worth it, too. I guess I can now see the power of God in each blade of grass. Your Kokum has given me the eyes to see. She has opened the eyes of my soul, I think, I hope I don’t sound too corny. I think it helped me to understand the patience of God through other things that it made me think about. I thought about raindrops after I thought about the snowflakes. The same thing must be true about raindrops. You learned about condensation, right? Well, every raindrop obviously comes from a different part of the land before it rises to the sky. So every raindrop must be different. It has rained billions of times on this old earth. It must be the same thing, we can see God’s patience in the number of times it has rained on this earth since the beginning of time. Can you imagine combining the number of raindrops with the number of snowflakes that have ever fallen on earth? Man, that’s major patience. I think about the grains of sand and how each grain of sand must have been a mountain or a hill billions of years ago and time has reduced them to a grain of sand. Erosion…it is patience at its best. You’re lucky to have a sober Kokum. My parents get drunk as often as your dad does. With you, at least your mom is sober. My parents both get drunk and they both swear at each other. They get into fisticuffs in the middle of the night, too. I usually take off and go to Brad’s house down the road. It ain’t no better there, sometimes, but it usually is. He offers me a mattress on the floor and I sleep there and hope that the mice leave me alone. I can’t sleep most nights. I’m worried that my drunk parents are gonna kill each other one of these nights when they are fighting. Their fights are getting worse and worse, it seems. Sometimes I stick around so I can go and call cops from Brad’s house. They have a phone, we don’t . We got cut a long time ago cuz my parents were boozing up all the money and not paying any bills. We hardly got nothing to eat most days. When things settle down, which they do after a few hours, I lay there all night sometimes and think about you. I thank God, too, that you are in my world. I hold you and dance with you and put my head on your shoulder til the sun comes up. That’s why I’m late for the bus every morning. I can’t sleep thinking about you. It makes every second of my life worth it, like it really means something, just to spend time thinking about you. See you tomorrow at school, snowflake…can’t call you grass…you might think I’m talking about Mary-Jo-Anna. I smoked some with Brad last night. Just about burst my lungs. First time I ever seen the stuff. Smells like horse shit…or American cigarettes. No wonder the Americans like it. It does something to time, like it slows it right down or something and it cements to a standstill. Everything slows down until time stands still and I guess that’s why they call it being stoned. Time turns stone still. See you at school. Oh yeah, Mr. Holland told me to read reference books aloud. He said it would improve my writing and my speech. I didn’t’ listen to him, though. I read old encyclopedias aloud at home. Got ‘em at the auction sale for fifty cents apiece. Yeah, Mr. Holland is cool. See you at school. P.S. I love you, raindrop.

They liked ‘chunking it’ in all their letters. They both knew that they were supposed to break the sentences into paragraphs, but they agreed not to do that. They would not let the teachers dictate the style of their love letters and so they agreed to ‘chunk it’. That way, they could practice a little bit of rebellion in their love letters. That way, they wouldn’t need to feel that they were doing everything that they had to do, that the teachers told them to do. They had a little bit of choice in life…the all-seers hadn’t taken away all of their freedom after all…they still had a little bit of choice in life. They weren’t totally controlled by the colonialists.  If they could still call us heathens in this day and age, then we could still call them colonialists in this day and age, she thought.  Some people say, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ she preferred to say, ‘a mouth for the speakers and an ear for the listeners.’

They would stand facing each other in the farthest fringes of the schoolyard in the outer limits and talk to each other like they were stuck somewhere in the middle of forever. Some of the little kids in the schoolyard would look at them from a distance and yell little teasers at them. Like:

"Gabriel and Phyllistine sitting in a tree,

 K-I-S-S-I-N-G,

First comes love,

Then comes marriage,

Then comes the baby carriage."

And then the little kids would all laugh out loud and run off like millions of ants when an old tree stump is lifted off the ground. Then there were the circling wolves…the people who were jealous of them. Their jealousy was written in their eyes and in the cruelty of their words. They were mostly the older kids. They would say things like, "Hey, Phyllistine, what did you do this weekend. Didja do..it? She would say, Yeah, I went to fly a kite, just like you did."

All of Phyllistine’s sisters and brothers told her that she was in puppy love, so she thought she was in puppy love. She didn’t feel the need to question their assessment, since some of them were older than she was. She thought, "Man, if this is puppy love, I could stay in puppy love forever."

*       *       *       *

The snow had turned into summer rain and Phyllistine and Gabriel were trying to blow another penniless Saturday afternoon…otherwise they would have had nothing to do…so they brainstormed to pass the time of day…and ultimately to pass the time of their lives on the reservation.  They sat on a big rock that first Saturday afternoon together and just looked out at the clear blue sky…hoping to see the imagined ocean someday on the shores of Vancouver.  Right now, it was just a daydream…but it was good to hear the waves as the ocean breathed on the shore.

Hey,  I think I figured out the power of zero. she announced to him because he had become her whole universe and for no other good reason.

Gee that’s mighty interesting, he teased, seeing as you almost flunked math until you got your skin, I mean your mark, saved by a tutor…you will barely pass Math 10, 20, & 30 after that…you will keep being tutored all the way through and now you have the audacity to announce that you know something that even Einstein hasn’t even thought about…

Or died thinking about it! She spat back. If you wanna insult me with your macho-er than- thou- attitude, go find yourself someone else to brainstorm with…You shouldn’t have such a rough time finding someone who could entertain the hell out of the brains of a shrivelled pea!

OK,  he put his arms up in surrender. Go ahead and make some shriveled pea soup…girls are good at making soup ain’t they?

"Well, if soup is all you understand about women, you’ll never keep a wife happy, you will only keep her fat! Do you wanna talk or make fun of me all day? I don’t wanna be anybody’s  shredded paper doll or your personal door mat so I’ll see you around," and she walked away.

Hey, hey, hey…come back here…I’m sorry Miss Sensitive, I didn’t know it was your crabbier-than-thou- day…I’ll be good…look at my angel arms all nicely folded… he mockingly pleaded.

Okay, but no more wise firecrackers…keep your shredding tongue to yourself, she scolded.

How did you arrive at the power of zero? he finally asked seriously.

"Well, I was thinking about the power of a circle…more specifically about the medicine wheel of the traditional people… It always speaks of balance…you know, life and death, day and night, truth and lies, light and dark…that kind of thing. They say that everything must balance out in the end…that is the power of the origin of the circle. It must forever seek this balance and achieve it in order to maintain its power as a circle. You can see in your mind’s eye that if balance doesn’t find itself, that the circle will wobble without this balance and it will eventally come to a stop because it is no longer a circle. It is a wobbling elipse or something like that, like a flattened rubber ball. It doesn’t spin anymore, it comes to a dead stop. In order to spin, it always has to keep its round shape.

 Anyways, you can see that the origin of the circle is anywhere and everywhere at the same time. Anywhere is the center. I could be standing at the top of the earth anywhere…and I will always be at the center. I could be at the top of the world and at the bottom of the earth at the same time…you know, in Australia or at the North Pole at some Inuit’s igloo and I would still be at the center of the world…depending on the point of view taken," she continued. 

Take a second to think about the power of the center being anywhere and everywhere at the same time when you are inside a circle and you’re trying to find the origin. So I take this imaginary golf ball in my hand and poke it anywhere with a pencil. The pencil will always be at the center of the golf ball no matter where I poke it, she explained as best she could.

Kinda like you thinking that you are always at the center of the Universe? Gee, you’re talking golf and you don’t even know how to play golf? Gee, you’re such a gifted golf ball philosopher. You really cheated the golf industry when you missed your calling as a golf ball analyst! he teased. She knew that he was attacking her again with his gentle criticism which she had become so used to…like the gentle breathing of waves along the shoreline…crashing against the rocks and eroding the jagged edges one grain of sand at a time in imaginary Vancouver.  She said nothing. She swallowed the well of her emotions because she loved his patience so much that she should see it like this.

He had become her greatest confidant…her greatest friend.  She could tell him anything and he would not think that she had crossed the deep end of her sanity.  She knew that he loved to go crazy with her whenever she announced that she had a brainstorm. She looked into his eyes and she could feel the sun rise. She adored him with her eyes and with her soul and her entire spirit.  She secretly thanked God in her mind for his existence but she didn’t dare tell him about exactly how she felt because she knew he couldn’t handle it properly…he still had such an inflated balloon ego…he would probably burst with pride in himself.  One little pin head could crash it and have the same ego shattering effect as a sledge hammer. Kind of not mature enough to be told that he was just great because he would go around thinking that he was God and then she would have to be responsible for his bringing out his immaturity in thinking so.  She didn’t want to be responsible if he hurt himself with his hot air balloon of inflated ego.  But she did love him no matter what.

I think that zero is equal to infinity. I even think there’s a mathematical formula for this equation. They say math has all the answers for everything. It is a universal language like music is. I used my golf ball analysis to come to this earth- shattering conclusion, she announced with finality.

How?

"How inna hell should I know? I’m not a mathematician…let them figure it out!  I’ve always dreamed of being a golf ball analyst. It’s not my role in life to come up with the mathematical formula for this idea or that idea or that zerois equal to infinity.  I don’t have that knowledge…all that I have is the idea…but there must be another human being born into this world who does have the knowledge of how to put this whole idea into a math equation! A person whose role in life is to come up with a formula to complete Einstein’s theory of relativity or the formula for the origin of a circle, which is really the power of zero is equal to infinity. People who think in thoughts of numbers and who understand the language of numbers and who feel the power of numbers. These are people who are obsessed with formulas and their mind wanders in abstract worlds of mathematical universes.  They see the whole Universe unfolding in numbers and mathematical formulas.  The Einsteins of this world who see the world through black rimmed glasses in the midnight in the dark of the Universe.

This is the gift of life that they were born with…their thing in life. But it ain’t my thing.  My thing in life is to just figure this minute little part of it…just based on intuition rather than mathematical knowledge. I have no mathematical knowledge…just hunches and brainstorms. I know that zero is the most versatile number.  To any number, you can add it, subtract it, multiply it and divide it and get the square root and always come up with zero. Zero goes on into infinity being zero. It starts off as zero and ends up as zero, exactly in the same place where it started from. It never moves but it is always moving. It always changes without ever changing. It halves into infinity. It doubles into infinity. It square roots into infinity. Zero knows the value of nothing. Total nothing and yet it knows the value of everything," she talked quietly.

 "If I am a true nothing, if I am a zero, I can walk beside, under, over, around any and every number without ever changing its value.  There’s a lesson to be learned here from the value of zero. You can walk beside a person without ever trying to change their value as a person and yet you have touched them somehow just by being there.  It is your being that changes them…your very existence…not your dogged aggression in trying to change them from who they are.  They change because they acknowledge your existence, not because you forced them to change."

Hold your horses. How? He was sitting straight up trying to understand every word she said.

When you add or subtract or divide or multiply zero to any number, it doesn’t matter in terms of changing the original value of that number. So zero can visit any number without changing its original value. I think you can go so far as to say that it can visit infinity without changing its original value. You see, the value of infinity is always changing, so it actually never changes…because it is always changing and it never stops. That is the constant…the fact that it never changes because it is always changing. The only number that can keep up with the ever-changing infinity is zero. Zero can forever change and at the same time forever remain the same. You can keep adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing zero without ever changing the value of it . Zero can travel equally with infinity like a star that travels so fast that it appears to be perfectly still…you’ve heard about those haven’t you? He had never heard of any such thing but he didn’t dare admit his ignorance in the fear that she would think that he was just another dumb Injun. She sat there silently. She sensed that she had said enough. It was time to think now…to reflect.

I don’t even understand Einstein anyhow. I just heard of his name and that he devleoped some insanely intellectual theory of relativity. I just say them big words to impress the hell outta ya. Can you now see how nothing can equal infinity…how nothing can travel with it and that zero is equal to nothing and that zero is equal to everything at the same time?  Kinda like no matter where you stand in circle, you are always at the center? she asked. "The power of a circle is infinite.  It goes on into infinity. The origin of a circle is nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The origin exists anywhere and everywhere all at once.  It is elusive and yet it is always there.  You can never touch it and yet it is always within your reach…and forever out of reach. Since nothing is equal to infinity and zero is equal to nothing, then zero must be equal to infinity. Zero is always equal to zero, no matter what…so it must be equal to zero when it is running side by side with infinity. It will always be equal to infinity for as long as there are numbers and for as long as there is time. It’s kinda like zero is the forever shadow of infinity. No matter where infinity goes, zero is there running right beside it without ever changing its value. If infinity is equal to a trillion trillions for a millionth of a second, then zero is also equal to a trillion trillions for a millionth of a second because it goes wherever infinity goes. It runs parallel to infinity wherever infinity goes.

It’s like the antimatter of matter. Matter would be infinity and antimatter would be zero. A trillion trillions would be cancelled out by a negative trillion trillions and you would be back to zero. I wonder what would happen if there were only a trillion zeros? It would only cancel out that many infinities and leave the rest…but that couldn’t happen, you see, because nothing travels with infinity to infinity except zero. Nothing keeps traveling as long as infinity keeps traveling. Infinity keeps increasing its value and zero never increases its value. They both remain constant. Infinity is constantly increasing its value as zero is constantly keeping its original value. They are constantly changing and staying the same at the same time."

Kinda like I’m worth so much and you’re just trying to keep up with me?

"Oh…my…gawd…but I’ll humor you, yeah kinda like that…only there is always an opposite…like I’m always trying to keep up with your infinitely inflated ego because I am not worth anything without it. Anyway, they say that a person could spend a whole lifetime doing nothing but counting numbers and they would die without ever finishing counting or ever getting to infinity and the same thing with trying to reach the value of zero.  You could spend a whole lifetime trying to arrive at zero and you can never reach nothing.  A half of zero is always zero. A quarter of zero is always zero. Ten percent of zero is always zero. Any percent of zero is always zero. Same way that you can never reach everything. You can’t reach nothing and you can’t reach everything.

You can never reach zero and you can never arrive at infinity. If the scientists of this world could ever figure this out and come up with the mathematical formula for it, who knows what human beings would be capable of? They say that mathematics has the answer to everything. There‘s gotta be a mathematical formula where it is an equation where zero is equal to infinity.  That would be the true power of zero, the origin of the circle, which is anywhere and everywhere at the same time. Come to think of it, do you know if there is a mathematical formula for the origin of a circle?"

He shrugged his shoulders and he actually had a word in edgewise, Gee, they, the human beings, might even be able to come up with a mathematical formula to help men understand women! You just said that mathematics has the answer to everything, he added.  He knew it was time for a laugh break. That will be the day that they figure out how zero is equal to infinity!  Seeing as how men are so great and women are nothing without men.

"Well, you see, that’s exactly the reason why there is no such mathematical formula…the men wouldn’t understand it anyway! she quipped back. Just remember that a man needs a woman just to be born. Men would be nothing without women because they can’t even be born without women! Men are zero and women are infinity."

Yeah, but women can’t get theirselves pregnant!  They need a man. He thought about what she had just said. His mind began to go in circles. Man, this woman drove him mad…but that’s why he wanted to be with her.  Where did the beginning of the circle meet the end? Was there a beginning? Was there an end? Was there ever a meeting of the beginning and the end? Or not? What if the beginning was the end and zero did equal infinity? After all, zero could infinitely be zero and the value of infinity could not be changed by the value of zero. He saw the simple formula in his mind: zero is equal to infinity and infinity is equal to zero. The power of it could blow your mind…if you failed to understand all the shattered pieces…

The more you thought about it, the clearer it seemed to become! The only number that could keep up with the rapid expansion of infinity is zero! It is always side by side with infinity no matter how big infinity gets and no matter how fast it expands. The origin of a circle is at the point of infinity at the last point of expansion but it changes to the next number before you can imagine the next number. It is forever changing. It never stays the same. So the origin of a circle is always changing. It never stays the same because it is always at the point of the current value of infinity which changes infinitely.

So the end of the circle is always at the beginning but at the same time, the end of the circle is never at the beginning because there is no beginning and therefore no end. The formula for the origin of a circle is that it is the point at which zero equals infinity. The origin is anywhere and nowhere and everywhere at the same time in the circle of time and space. You can plot the origin anywhere at any time and it would always be at the center but it would have a different value because the value of infinity is constantly a variable…and the value if zero is also constantly a variable. There’s gotta be a mathematical formula that proves that zero equals infinity. There’s gotta be a mathematical formula that verifies this proof: zero is equal to infinity and infinity is equal to zero. That is the power of a circle. The power of a circle is zero and the power of a circle is infinity at the same time. This is the mathematical formula for the origin of a circle….Oh well, he was no Einstein, hell, he wasn’t even a genius, but she sure had him thinking! Now, THAT took a genius…somebody who could make him think. He liked to have a lazy mind. He liked to not think.  Anybody who could get him to really think was some genius!

"Hey, let’s go to your Kokum’s, he suggested. I like her bannock and bacon grease and tea. It had been an incredible Saturday afternoon at her brainstorm. It was free. It was a good thing because they never had any Saturday afternoon money anyway…Everyone was always broke on the reservation. You had to do free things" when life came without money…on any afternoon…on every afternoon. That was the life of living in poverty…every day was a struggle just to get through.

"When was