Flowers for the Chief

I reached the island by boat. It was in the early eighties I guess. I had come from the prairies, where the boom had ended and there was no work to be had and so there was no reason to stay. I headed west without much of an idea of where I was going, and I guess I stopped there as much because I ran out of land as for any other reason.

For five years I stayed with them. For four and a half I planted the flowers.

With every year the Chief's condition got worse. He took to the bed soon after I arrived, and he didn't leave it until he passed away some five years later. He was an old man, and he was dying of cancer, and so it was only a matter of time.

But it wasn't just the Chief that was wasting away. It was the whole place. It was all dying with him.

It had become the kind of place, you see, where one man held them all together. I never knew the Chief when he was well. When I first arrived he was already too sick to speak for more then a minute. And if you had seen him on that first day, you would have said he'd had less then a year.

He lasted five. Those other four are a testament to his strength.

And as that strength left, and the color drained from his face, the wrinkles becoming sags that masked his features, well the town took on a similar complexion.

But that alone does not explain it.

Of course there was the abuse, and that had something to do with it. Yes, it had been over a half century before, but that isn't much time for those kind of crimes. It takes more then just a generation to heal those wounds.

But I don't know. All I know is whatever it was, they were all dying, and I think they knew it. They seemed to appreciate me though. And I appreciated that. I think it was welcomed that I was an outsider. They needed to be reminded there was something else.

After a few months of doing the handiwork that needed to be done, the job I'd been hired for, I had gotten mostly caught up with the repairs. And so it was about then that I took to planting the flowers around the cabin. Just in my spare time at first, here and there, to give the place some color.

And as the fighting got worse, and as the Chief lapsed into those long periods of unconsciousness that we all thought would be the last, I kpet on planting more.

Now I wasn't much of a gardener, never had any training or anything, and in a way that was a blessing. I'd plant the buds where they'd want to go, and I didn't give much thought to what it would all look like in a few months. There wasn't much order to any of it when they'd come up.

And that was the beauty of it.

I like to think that the flowers helped bring back a bit of balance to the place. That they slowed down the process a tad.

In the end of course it was all too much. You couldn't replace the Chief with a bunch of flowers. But I like to think they helped, that maybe they were the reason that it all held together as long as it did. At least the Chief, when he finally did die, didn't have to witness the pain that came next.

- posted by Sigurd12/12/2004 01:07:00 AM