Copyright © 2019 Drew Hayden Taylor
This edition copyright © 2019 Cormorant Books Inc.
This is a first edition.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities, and the Government of Ontario through Ontario Creates, an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture, and the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Chasing painted horses / a novel by Drew Hayden Taylor.
Names: Taylor, Drew Hayden, 1962– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190145552 |
Canadiana (ebook) 20190145560 | ISBN 9781770865600 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781770865617 (html)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS8589.A885 C43 2019 | DDC C813/.54—DC23
Cover design: angeljohnguerra.com
Interior text design: tannicegdesigns.ca
Printer: Friesens
Printed and bound in Canada.
CORMORANT BOOKS INC.
260 Spadina Avenue, Suite 502, Toronto, ON M5T 2E4
www.cormorantbooks.com
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Landmarks
Cover
Frontmatter
Start of Content
Backmatter
PageList
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To Ms. Kappele. Amazing what a couple glasses of wine at a dinner party can produce.
CHAPTER ONE
HOWEVER IMPOLITELY, “IT’S colder than a christian’s heart” is how Ralph Thomas’s childhood friend William would have described this morning’s weather. Ignoring the theological and politically incorrect implications, William would have been essentially correct. And though Ralph was several hundred kilometres and two decades away from where and when his friend had said that, it was indeed a very cold morning, religious affiliations notwithstanding.
The temperature at present was hovering somewhere around a brisk minus ten or so on the Celsius scale, creating an urban landscape of huddled masses struggling to stay warm in the bright sunlight. Across the city, its denizens walked the streets bundled up in scarves, coats, heavy sweaters, and all sorts of unflattering woollen and fake fur hats, trying in vain to ward off the climate. Evidently, being Canadian had its downside.
Somewhere in that Canadian city known as Toronto, not that far from where Ralph Thomas was planning to start his working day as protector of the public, sat a man. Social workers, politicians, statisticians, and people with spare change would call him a typical — whatever that may mean — homeless man. A panhandler. A street person. A representative of those who have slipped through the safety nets in a supposedly sympathetic society. Though covered in layers of mismatched, dirty clothing, this man smiled out at the world as he sat on his kingdom, commonly known as a sidewalk grate, a cloud of steam making him appear oddly unfocused and mysteriously hazy to the occasional passerby. He was known to the world — the world that cared, mind you — simply as Harry, due to his bushy beard, eyebrows, and unkempt hair that peeked out from underneath a worn cap saluting a local hockey team that did not deserve such saluting, which obviously did little to protect his ears from the climate. But no matter. He was survivor. What’s a pair of cold ears to a man who every day walked the tightrope of life? As an Aboriginal man, he was a contradiction in stereotypes — on one hand, he met the cliché of being down-and-out and looking for other people to supplement his condition. On the other hand, the rumour that Native people did not have body or facial hair did not apply to him.
A long time ago, when Harry could remember and was remembered, he’d come from a Cree reserve far out in the direction where the sun set every evening. He’d wandered in the direction of the rising sun to seek his fortune and had landed here on the shores of an inland sea, his fortune unfound. His financial empire now consisted mostly of donated spare change, a hodgepodge of mismatched, discarded attire that he had come across in past years, and disjointed memories. It has been said by a man far smarter than Harry that some are born to greatness, others achieve it, and there are those who have it thrust upon them. The same could be said for destitution. Harry had his thrust upon him with violent determination, courtesy of a negligent and schizophrenic society confused in its understanding of the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and everybody else. But no matter. He was where he was, and, all things considered, he was happy. Cold, but happy. The vast majority of the world’s population could say they were cold, but only a few could say they were legitimately happy. Harry smiled.
Like most people, the forgotten man had talents. Some were recognizable: coming from an oral culture and having spent years with multitudes of multicultural down-and-outers who had been pushed aside by what prided itself as a just society, a cultural mosaic, he could imitate any number of accents. It often helped in panhandling. Amused patrons were more generous when he spoke with a Jamaican patois or an impressive Scottish burr. Other talents in his possession were not so obvious. He could see people. Not dead people, or aliens, or demons, or anything Hollywood, or what a psychiatrist or social worker would find worthy of their billable hours. Instead, Harry saw people as they really were — what emanated from their souls, not what they appeared to be to everyone else.
Once he’d been about to receive a few quarters from this lovely woman in a checkered sweater, until a man he’d assumed to be her husband angrily pulled her away, irritably mumbling something about “not encouraging those types.” What the woman in the checkered top didn’t seem to see was something that was only too evident to Harry. The man had no eyes, just dark apertures out of which dripped ominous obsidian drops of pure malice. It was like his spirit was slowly escaping from his body and leaking out through the two orifices where most people’s eyes usually were. Harry had watched the couple disappear into the crowd of spring shoppers, leaving a trail on the pavement of the smouldering blackness still slowly oozing from the front of the man’s head. Harry was blissfully unaware that sometime later the man had killed the woman in a rage, afterwards setting fire to a cottage they shared in Muskoka.
But such sight wasn’t all bad. Another time he’d spotted a little white girl, no more than nine years old, just across the street, petting a smallish dog tied to a tree. The poor creature was panting and very uncomfortable in the August heat, so the little girl gave the dog her vanilla ice cream cone. Dietary concerns aside, the dog gratefully accepted the cold, somewhat moist offering, quickly devouring it, tail wagging constantly. The girl looked across the street at Harry and smiled. Harry smiled back. To his eyes, she was glowing, her tiny body surrounded by a multi-hued aura of some sort. Somewhere in that little girl, surprisingly close to the surface, sat the spirit of someone who would do good works in her future, changing people (and, it seemed, dogs), places, and times for the better. It was the rare kind of spirit Buddhists would venerate. If there were a bell curve of good and bad, this little creature would somehow transcend it.
Harry didn’t know if his unique talent was a product of his Aboriginal heritage, several decades of altering the chemical balance of his brain, or merely being the ultimate observer of society due to his privileges as a bystander. It merely existed, and existed in him. There was little he could do about it, so he did his best to live with it. Besides, he had other problems to deal with.
Winter days like this made being a Canadian homeless person exceedingly difficult. The vent that he called home was a double-e
dged sword. It provided a certain amount of warmth, but the steam made him and his clothing damp. Dampness and cold weather do not go together. He had many friends who had lost fingers and limbs to such a combination once the bitter winter night fell. Sometimes they’d lost more. And worst of all, people of society often had their heads down and were in such a hurry that they seldom saw him, both as an actual physical presence and as a person of need. Still, like everything else in his life, there was little he could do about it; he merely accepted it. Privately, he loathed the season. Though his people had been born to the frozen wastelands of the Prairies, Harry had enough white blood flowing through his veins to make this time of year difficult. Luckily, not everyone shared his sentiments. At the other end of the spectrum, there were some who found the yearly tilt of the planet away from the sun a rather enjoyable experience.
Such a person was the aforementioned Ralph Thomas, currently navigating piles of dusky-coloured snow alongside the kilometres of urban sidewalks. The man liked really cold days, particularly the way they made his senses more aware and awake, the way they made his skin tingle and his nose hairs stick together after a deep breath. It was a feeling of life or survival, not like those stupefying, humid days of summer that zapped his strength, draining his will to do anything. He knew most people usually cursed cold Canadian winter days, but not Ralph. Ralph Thomas had grown up on a small, isolated reserve several hours north of Toronto, a place called Otter Lake. So on some genetic, cultural, and personal level, he knew he could take the worst this city and the tilted nature of the planet could throw at him. His people had faced, fought, and triumphed over the Canadian winter since their fabled beginning known as Time Immemorial.
Taking a deep breath, he uttered to no one in particular, “Oh, that feels good.” This was Ralph’s element, his environment. Ever since he was a child, winter had been his favourite season. Half jokingly, he’d asked his father, when he was still alive, if there wasn’t some Inuit blood floating through their family.
As proof of his resilience, Ralph’s jacket wasn’t zipped up, and all that separated his legs and torso from the frigid air was a thin layer of wool combined with polyester, the blend of his Toronto Police Service-issued uniform. And a bulletproof vest. To Ralph, long johns were for long treks in the woods or hours on a snowmobile, not for short jaunts from a house to a mall, a bus, a Tim Hortons, or his division. Long johns in the city were for wimps, he often joked and really believed. Today was no different. Enjoying the briskness of the morning, Ralph noticed passerby after passerby, heads down low, elbows close to their bodies, ignoring the world around them as their feet made short, hesitant steps on the snow-caked sidewalks, hoping not to slide embarrassingly into a salt and pepper snowdrift. As usual, he seemed to be the only one enjoying the morning.