The Stone House

3.

I was brought here as a child, two years before the town of Indian Head was named. I was born in London and travelled with my father to the New World with the promises of opportunity and free land. I helped pull the large round stones from the land we had been gifted to help make it suitable for farming. Along with stones we pulled up skulls from the soil. Throughout the area over one thousand skulls were found.

No other human bones were found. Just the heads. Dark rumours spread among the people of our little settlement. This land was a gift but also a prison. We couldn't afford to leave – even if we wanted to. The skulls were stacked and were blessed by both a Cree Shaman and a Catholic priest before being sold and sent east to be ground for gunpowder. A government administrator in Ottowa heard the story and his clean office hands dunked his quill and named our town Indian Head.

The name stuck.

When I was fourteen I met Catherine. She was Cree and the daughter of an Indian trader who had settled. She had hair like flowing water of pure night and eyes that had pulled me in and never let me go. We married at fifteen. Over the next two years she bore me two girls. My father lived long enough to see them both born and Catherine and I buried him a year later.

My daughter's names are Abbey and Penelope. Abbey was the older, spirited, adventurous but suffered from fits. The doctor thought it might stem from her mixed-blood and prescribed us to let her at full moon. It broke my heart to see the scalpel slice into my daughter's arm, but we filled a small bowl with her blood each time the moon filled the sky. I would do anything to help her recover. For it was far worse to see her taken by a fit, falling to the ground, back arched and fingers-flexed in spasm as her tiny body shook. Penelope was the youngest, small for her age, quiet, studious obviously sharing her mother's intellect (and stubbornness).

Abbey, would play out all day in our yard while I worked in the fields. Catherine watched and tended to our children.

The train track crossed our land. When we had found out about it going through both our land and Indian head my father had been thrilled. So many communities had been abandoned. The train meant life. I remember looking up at him as he ruffled my hair, with our town newspaper in his hand. "We are going to be okay, boy" he said.

As a child I watched as the Chinamen came and laid the tracks. I made some money bringing them water and watched as the squatted in circles, faces creased from the sun, rough hands carefully re-pouring their tea.

As a boy I waved my Union Jack flag as the first train thundered past.

As a man I watched my children play in our back yard. We had one rule for Abbey – do not under any circumstances go on the tracks.

"But that's where he wants to play!" She said, talking back to me in her ever-playful way.

"Who?" I said. We had barely visitors of any kind.

"Him!" She said giggling, pointing behind me. She laughed again covering her mouth with her palms as if reacting to something.

I knew there was nothing there, but felt the smallest of draughts, like someone had let out a breath on my neck. I snapped my head back and for a second I thought I actually did see something, so much so that I jumped back.

There was nothing but my empty room behind me.

Abbey laughed again pointing at me. I was going to tickle her something silly for that trick, until her face changed. Her jaw clenched and her eyes rolled back. Her back arched pushing her chest out and I rushed forward and caught her before she fell and watched helplessly as her hands clenched up like a dying crow's claws and she shook in a relentless spasm in my arms.