Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden
Praise for Through Black Spruce
Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association Fiction Book of the Year
“Boyden’s novel is, simply, beautiful: you will lose yourself in the richness of its prose and the ever-deepening puzzles it inveigles you into. Through Black Spruce is fluent, involving fiction, and as good an advertisement as any for unforgiving wilderness living.”
—The Times (UK)
“Boyden … settles in as a major voice in Canadian fiction … [and] assures this remote corner of the country and its citizens a permanent place in the Canadian literary landscape. Given the rich cast of minor characters in Through Black Spruce, we can only hope for more.”
— The Gazette (Montreal)
“Reflects its crisp, poetic title … [Will Bird is] a thoroughly engaging storyteller … That wry, self-deprecating voice lulls us through a series of adventures alternately sweet and harrowing … An experience beautifully rendered in the raw poetry of Boyden’s prose … Powerful and powerfully told.”
—The Washington Post
“Funny, frank and refreshingly unsentimental … Boyden manages to show how families can be reconstituted. His characters are vulnerable, true, but they’re remarkably resilient.”
—National Post
“Through Black Spruce is an arresting novel with unexpected twists and turns. It’s also an important contribution to the Native literary voice in this country.”
—Tomson Highway, author of Kiss of the Fur Queen
“Boyden’s first novel … wowed everyone … [and] Through Black Spruce is poised to keep the adulation coming.”
—Toronto Life, Best of Fall edition
“I don’t usually blurb friends, but Joseph’s book is so great that I have to break my rules. Buy this book; read this book. You will love it, too.”
—National Book Award–winning author Sherman Alexie, author of Reservation Blues
“Subtle, thought-provoking … Through Black Spruce interweaves two related storylines into a single compelling narrative … Rendered in crisp, parsed sentence fragments with a keen eye for both beauty and brutality … Scenes are rich in detail, and heady with the blood and grit of a life lived close to the ground … An impressive work, demonstrating once again Boyden’s keen ability to bridge worlds and to create characters that will linger.”
— Times Colonist (Victoria)
“Boyden writes passionately, with an eye for detail, texture, and sensations … It is Boyden’s gift as a storyteller that enables him to see the beauty in the poverty, the struggle and the daily boredom … Through Black Spruce is exceptional for its revealing portrayal of the Crees of Moosonee and for its tangible depiction of life in the North … The book is a wild and crazy ride … [Boyden’s] refreshing perspective in this novel … will do much for a misunderstood part of our country.”
—Wataway News (Sioux Lookout, Ontario)
“Joseph Boyden achieves a beautiful balance between his characters and nature, between the hardships of contemporary life and their strong connection to the past.”
—Nino Ricci, author of The Origin of Species and Testament
“With Through Black Spruce coming after Three Day Road, Joseph Boyden is creating a new imaginary vision of this country and its people—so imaginary that it is inescapably real.”
—John Ralston Saul, author of A Fair Country:
Telling Truths About Canada
“An extraordinary tour de force … Boyden has created Will Bird with a powerful, unique voice, a compelling voice that weaves through a story through decades of life in the bush … A novel with flesh and blood people we come to care deeply about.”
—The Chronicle Herald (Halifax)
“Stunning at being a million things at once, but at heart, it’s a page-turning campfire story told by one person to another in hushed tones, heartbeat to heartbeat … Woven of equal parts violence and tragedy, humour, empathy and forgiveness, [it’s] a muscular book worthy of all the … hype … An intricate portrait of contemporary Aboriginal communities … Emotionally satisfying, suspenseful and well-crafted.”
—NOW Magazine (Toronto)
“An astonishingly powerful novel of contemporary Aboriginal life, full of the dangers and harsh beauty of both forest and city.”
— Oxford Review (Woodstock, Ontario)
“An engrossing story … Lyrical and assured … [Boyden] writes with so much heart that readers will have no choice but to fall in love with Will and Annie, however flawed and human they might be.”
—Georgia Straight (Vancouver)
“Powerful.”
—Victoria News (Victoria)
“Boyden writes with unassailable authenticity; his latest is strongly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“It is a powerful novel of place and the ties that bind families … A fine achievement, Through Black Spruce is extraordinary.”
—Irish Examiner
“Sometimes a first novel is so good, as Three Day Road was, that it seems unlikely a writer can achieve something so great again, but Boyden has reached the same heights in his second novel.”
—The Chronicle Journal (Thunder Bay)
“A most deserving winner of the Giller Prize.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“A remarkable view into a lost world dismantled so brutally by the white ‘wemestikushu’ … Boyden guides us through customs, mythologies and rituals that attend life in the bush.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Richly textured … An intelligent, multilayered accomplishment, and well worth reading.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Mesmerising. In the wild, dreams are prophetic and spiritual truths revealed … his characters are most moving when revelations occur in small, quiet moments.”
—The Independent
“Boyden is definitely a gifted storyteller. His narrative progresses with practised ease.”
—Quill & Quire
“The sensuous apprehension of a distant, perilous, ineffably beautiful world draws us in and won’t let us go.”
—Kirkus Reviews
PENGUIN CANADA
THROUGH BLACK SPRUCE
JOSEPH BOYDEN’s first novel, Three Day Road, was selected for The Today Show Book Club; won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year, the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award; and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. His second novel, Through Black Spruce, was awarded the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Canadian Booksellers Association Fiction Book of the Year; it also earned him the CBA’s Author of the Year award. He divides his time between Northern Ontario and Louisiana, where he teaches writing at the University of New Orleans.
ALSO BY JOSEPH BOYDEN
Three Day Road
Born with a Tooth
(short stories)
JOSEPH BOYDEN
THROUGH
BLACK SPRUCE
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008
Published in this edition, 2009
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)
Copyright © Joseph Boyden, 2008
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note:This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Boyden, Joseph, 1966–
Through black spruce / Joseph Boyden.
ISBN 978-0-14-301787-5
I. Title.
PS8553.O9358T49 2009 C813’.6 C2009-902205-2
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AMANDA
Nisakihakan
JACOB
Nkosis
WILLIAM AND PAMELA
Kotakiyak Nicishanu
1
GILL NETS
When there was no Pepsi left for my rye whisky, nieces, there was always ginger ale. No ginger ale? Then I had river water. River water’s light like something between those two. And brown Moose River water’s cold. Cold like living between two colours. Like living in this town. When the whisky was Crown Royal, then brown Moose River water was a fine, fine mix.
You know I was a bush pilot. The best. But the best have to crash. And I’ve crashed a plane, me. Three times. I need to explain this all to you. I was a young man when I crashed the first time. The world was wide open. I was scared of nothing. Just before Helen and I had our oldest boy. The first time I crashed I was drunk, but that wasn’t the reason I crashed. I used to fly a bush plane better with a few drinks in me. I actually believe my eyesight improved with whisky goggles on. But sight had nothing to do with my first crash. Wait. It had everything to do with it. Snowstorm. Zero visibility. As snow blinded my takeoff from the slick runway, I got the go-ahead with a warning from the Moosonee flight tower: harder snow coming.
An hour later and I’d made it a hundred miles north of Moose River on my way to pick up trappers not wanting but needing to come in from their lines. A rush to find them with night coming. I had a feeling where they’d be. Me, I was a natural in a plane. But in snow? One minute I’m humming along, the next, my fuel line’s gummed and I’m skidding and banging against a frozen creek. The crazy thing? Had I come in a few feet to the left or right, blind like I did, I would have wrapped my plane around black spruce lining the banks. Head a mush on the steering. Broken legs burning on a red-hot motor. The grandparents sometimes watch out. Chi meegwetch, omoshomimawak!
My plane wasn’t too damaged, but this was a crash nonetheless. And I emerged from the first true brush with it. The long darkness. No need to speak its name out loud.
Soon as I forced the door open, the snow, it stopped falling. Like that. Like in a movie. And when the cloud cover left on a winter afternoon a hundred plus miles north of Moosonee in January, the cold came, presented itself in such a forceful way that I had two choices.
The first was to assume that the cold was a living thing that chased me and wanted to suck the life from me. I could get angry at it, desperate for some sense of fairness in the world, and then begin to panic.
Or my second option was to make up my mind that the cold, that nature, was just an unfortunate clash of weather systems. If I made my mind up this second way, that the physical world no longer held vengeance and evil just beyond the black shadow of spruce, then I’d try and make do with what I had. And when I realized what an idiot I was for ending up here all alone without the proper gear—just a jean jacket with a sweater under it and running shoes on my feet—I’d get angry, desperate for some sense of fairness in the world, and begin to panic.
Me, I preferred the first option, that Mother Nature was one angry slut. She’d try and kill you first chance she got. You’d screwed with her for so long that she was happy to eliminate you. But more than that, the first option allowed me to get angry right away, to blame some other force for all my troubles. The panic came much quicker this way, but it was going to come anyways, right?
And so me, I climbed out of my cockpit and onto the wing on that frigid afternoon in my jean jacket and running shoes, walked along the wing, fearful of the bush and the cold and a shitty death all around me. I decided to make my way to the bank to collect some firewood and jumped onto the frozen creek.
I sank to my chest in that snow, and immediately realized I was a drunken fool. The shock of fast-flowing ice water made my breath seize, tugging at my legs, pulling at my unlaced running shoes so that the last thing my feet felt was those shoes tumbling away with the current.
By the time I flopped back onto the wing, my stomach to my feet had so little feeling that I had to pull my way back to the cockpit with wet fingers, tearing the skin from them when they froze to the aluminum. My breath came in hitches. When I tried my radio, and my wife finally picked it up, she couldn’t understand me. She thought I was a kid fooling around on his father’s CB and hung up on me.
Like I said, panic came quick. I could waste more time and the last of my energy calling back, hoping to get Helen to understand it was me and that I needed help now, but how to tell her exactly where I was? They might be able to find me tomorrow in daylight, but not now with the night closing in. And so I did what I knew I had to do. I crawled out of the cockpit again, onto my other wing, and threw myself off it, hoping not to find more water under the snow.
I hit hard ice this time, and it knocked the little breath left out of me. My jeans and jacket were already frozen worse than a straitjacket, and the shivers came so bad my teeth felt like they were about to shatter. I knew my Zippo was in my coat pocket but probably wet to uselessness.
Push bad thoughts away. One thing at a time. First things first. I crawled quick as I could, trying to stand and walk, and I frankensteined my way to the trees and began snapping dry twigs from a dead spruce.
After I made a pile, I reached into my chest pocket, breaking the ice from the material that felt hard as iron now. My fingers had lost all feel. I reached for my cigarettes, struggled to pull one from my pack, and clinked open the lighter. I’d decided that if the lighter worked, I’d enjoy a cigarette as I started a fire. If the lighter didn’t work, I’d freeze to death and searchers would find me with an unlit smoke in my mouth, looking cool as the Marlboro Man. On the fifteenth thumb roll I got the lighter going. I was saved for the first time. I reached for my flask in my ass pocket and struggled to open it. Within five minutes I had a fire going. Within fifteen I??
The darkness of a James Bay night in January is something you two girls know well. Annie, you’re old enough to remember your grandfather. Suzanne, I don’t know. I hope so. Your moshum, he liked nothing more than taking you girls out, bundled up like mummies, to look at the stars and especially the northern lights that flickered over the bay. He’d tell you two that they danced just for you, showed you how to rub your fists together to make them burn brighter. Do you remember?
My first crash ended good. My old friend Chief Joe flew out to me the next morning, found me by the smoky fire I’d kept burning all night. We got my plane unstuck and had a couple of good drinks and he gave me a spare pair of boots. Then Joe went to find those trappers and I got my gas lines unfrozen and flew home to Helen.
Joe quit flying soon after that. He was ready for something else. Me, I kept going. I had no other choice. A wife who wanted children, the idea of a family to feed coming to us like a good sunrise on the horizon. I made my choices. I was young still, young enough to believe you can put out your gill net and pull in options like fish.
The snow’s deep here, nieces. I’m tired, but I have to keep walking. I’m so tired, but I’ve got to get up or I’ll freeze to death. Talking to you, it keeps me warm.
2
DUMB
They keep him on the top floor, the critical one. I can smell the raw scent of him. It lingers just under the soap of the birdbath his nurse Eva gave him earlier. I’m close to his ear, close enough to see a few grey hairs sprouting from it. “Can you hear me?” I’m gone eight months, then home for a day, only to have this happen. “Eva tells me to talk to you. I feel stupid, but I’ll try for a few minutes before Mum comes back. She can’t catch me, though.” She’d take it as a sign of me weakening, of finally becoming a good Catholic girl like she’s always wanted.