Born
With A Tooth
by Joseph Boyden
Novel
292 pages
Trade Paper
5.5" X 8.5"
ISBN 1896951295
$21.95 CDN
|
Born
With A Tooth
by Joseph Boyden
Excerpt from first
chapter:
As I stood
outside the church before her funeral, Weesageechak showed up in
his ugliest-dog-in-the-world costume, but he kept a distance, worried
I had another trick up my sleeve. I waved to him and he barked.
An old nun I'd known for many years came up to me and we talked
a short while. I said to her, "Hello, Sister Jane," and
she said, "Hello, Mr. Cheechoo," and we talked of Linda
when she was a little girl, and how she always wore her rain boots,
rain or shine. That nun and me, we had a good laugh together. She
asked me to sit with her during the mass. When that priest began
telling us that Linda could not go to heaven because she committed
suicide, Sister Jane began to shake. But I wasn't angry. I knew
Linda was already there. I watched my granddaughter Mary raise her
head to look at this priest, and then I watched all my relations
who had come from many different places raise their heads too. We
all raised our heads up as if we were one big person, growing bigger
by the minute. And then it came. A single drumbeat from the back
of the church, travelling through it the way I once saw lightning
travel through water. And then it came again, then again. The priest,
he didn't like that. He shouted and began to walk towards Joseph
and his beating drum in the back of the church, but by the time
he got to Linda's casket we had already stood as one, blocking him
from going farther. All of us who knew how circled the drum and
beat it with him, using our hands, our shoes, our fists. We lifted
our heads up and tightened our voices and sang a song for Linda
and for her mother. For all of us. I looked to my grandson Joseph
and he looked to me. I looked around me at all my relations around
this drum, and to Sister Jane, who'd come to join us. We all stood
in a circle and lifted up our voices to Linda and to Gitchi-Manitou,
to God. And I began to feel something good that I'd not felt in
a long time. |
