Born with a Tooth Read Free Page A

start sucking, you know it. I remember, when I was a small girl, I was playing out back by the edge of the bush and a chainsaw scream started up in my head and sent me wailing to my mother. I put my finger in my ear and pulled it away all bloody. My mother said, “Hush, Mary,” and stuck the point of a rolled-up towel in and wiggled out three of the buggers. Then she took her bottle of rye and tipped my head sideways and poured some in. My first taste of whisky came running down my cheek, mixed with blood that I licked off the side of my face.
    Sometimes I think I fell in love with my husband, Ollie, because no matter how bad the blackflies got in spring, he’d still go out and about, working on his old car or hunting in the bush. He didn’t let a thing stop him. When we first married he’d get a bottle of American bourbon that had been smuggled from over the border and take me out in his little boat late at
    night to look at stars and get drunk and silly. He’d take his shirt off, even if it was early spring with a sheen of thin ice forming on the lake, and stand on the bow and say, “Look, Mary, that bright one there is the dog star. It’s my lucky star. Me and him, that dog, we talk to one another.” Then he’d howl out until his voice came bouncing back across the water, and I’d join in and yelp to his star and to the moon until we were both out of breath. We were young and crazy. When Ollie got killed, there was grumbling and rumours it wasn’t an accident. Maybe it wasn’t planned, some of the old ones said, but it wasn’t no accident, either.
    Then our band council brought the Bingo Palace to Shawanagan. The one road running out of the rez got paved, and Chief Roddy bought his Cadillac. The Bingo Palace changed a few things.
    There are still blackflies in spring, and old Jacob the hunter still keeps our freezers full of deer meat in winter. What’s changed now is we got a common focus on the rez, something to look forward to most weeknights. We got the wasichu driving in with their money, ready to spend it, sometimes driving all the way from Toronto. The Palace has given us a name.
    Wasichu means white man. Grandmother never had the chance to teach me the Ojibwe word, so I borrowed from the Sioux. Don’t mistake me for a Plains woman, though. I’m a proud Ojibwe. The Sioux, when they came this far east, were our enemy, and we only feared and respected the Iroquois more. My grandmother spoke fluent Ojibwe, but she’s dead a long time ago. Before Ollie came along, I once learned some Indian from a South Dakota boy. He was Oglala Sioux and carried it proud like his barrel chest. Even though the wordshe taught me weren’t my language, they were still Indian, and better than nothing, I figure. In return, I taught him to say the only Ojibwe I knew, other than swear words. Ahnee Anishnaabe means “Hello, Indian” in my language. One of these days I’ll take a break from the Palace and learn some Ojibwe, something I can pass on to my two kids.
    But what I can pass on to them now is my knowing bingo. I thought it was the stupidest game I ever heard of when word of the money started drifting in eleven years ago, with Yankee Indians in big new cars. Chief Roddy knew we were all down and out and there was no future for anyone collecting pogey and baby bonus cheques. Roddy was big enough to see that bingo might bring us some freedom.
    You have to be a smooth talker to try to swing the elders in your favour, especially when you’re selling something as foreign as gambling. In the end, it came down to the council elders, the old women, to decide. Roddy brought money backers in from an upstate New York rez, Iroquois with slick black hair in ponytails and three-piece suits and eagle feathers. They carried charts with red lightning zigzags on them and slide projectors under their arms.
    The Iroquois dazzled our old women with talk of money for