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Lesley Belleau

voice, the tube vibrating in his throat, as clear as a thousand angry
bees. Soon, he almost stopped talking altogether. No one to hear, no
one to listen. It was his silence that provoked my discomfort. His voice
to me was the colour of his life, and nights were the only time I could
manage such silences, with the howl of the wind to comfort me. His
slow death seemed appropriate at midnight, when life was in hiding. I
would trace his shrunken body lined under the sweat soaked sheets,
remembering his tales of the residential school, the army, his years on
the streets. I would wait until my eyes adjusted to the dark and find his
tattoos on his arms, the ink turned greenish from age, and think that
once his arm-skin was a clear brown when he was a boy. The progres-
sion of age, of time’s rapid movement was too incomprehensible then,
so I ran, ran and let my daddy die a silent man, his eyes watching me
under the dark, dark midnight moon.

Death happened like a passing train. We knew it was time. We
waited, gathered, sensing its arrival, circling his bed, waiting for the
headlights to appear. We heard its sound first. An increase in breath,
chug-chug-chug-chug, a buzz in our ears, a pounding of our own
heartbeats increasing with his breaths; the sound of darkness tugging
at our senses. Daddy’s eyes opened. They saw everything at once, held
such knowledge of living that my mind swam. He held the elements in
his eyes, became hunger and thirst, animal and plant, heavy and light-
ness. My senses edged toward pain, my throat opened and closed
along with his. The train passed by, whipping forward like a perfectly
slung arrow, making the earth tremble, our legs tremble. Trembling.
And then the caboose. Always wave goodbye to the caboose. My arm
raised goodbye. CHOO-CHOO!! I slowly watched his mouth close
into a silence more pure, more tranquil than his last voiceless year.

Standing by his grave, I am furious at my own voicelessness his
last years. There were more. Stories. Untold stories. I want to inhale
them out of his body as I stand over the thick, earthy mound, and let
them sink into me, teaching me his life-walk, making his knowledge
more complete, more a part of me. There is so much that he had taken
with him. I didn’t realize then how much he left behind, how much
he’d still give over the years.

My son was born howling, skin rage-red, eyes wide open
searching for me. When our eyes connected, I felt my daddy again,
laughing somewhere, the past twirling into the now like smoke rising
from a peacepipe. | was in the middle of life for the first time, knowing

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