The Scream

The dogs were barking. My mother opened the door just a crack, enough for the Law to get in. I don’t remember how many Law Men there were, but they had four times as many arms, scooping up Cassie and Carol as they stood, frozen by fear, in the kitchen. Their arms must have been hot because Cassie and Carol came alive, kicking and biting and screaming. The Law grew more arms and held my sisters tight. 

The Law Men swept my mother into a corner in the kitchen, shrinking her down to half her size with a piece of paper, shaking in her hand—a court order to tear us apart. Mike, sobbing, erected a barricade of chair legs to defend himself under the kitchen table. Through the kitchen window, I saw our neighbour Anne Jacobs shielding the dogs from the Law Men outside so they wouldn’t get shot. 

I watched this all like a play, History in One Act, standing on the stairs. The Law Men’s many arms got through Mike’s barricade, and they pulled him out towards the door, his heels screaming across the linoleum. Cassie and Carol were reaching for our mother, but their little arms were no match for the Law’s. Mother started to grow bigger and bigger, her voice ballooning her up until she was as big as the Law, so they all turned on her to hold her down. The door was open.

I ran down the stairs, squeezing through the many arms of a Law Man calling me “Son.”

They had Mike in the doorway, the veins in his little neck sticking out like tree roots. I grabbed him and tried to pull him out of the Law’s grasp while he yelled my name over and over to give me power. “Mack! Mack!” It didn’t work. The Law picked me up off the ground, and I was wrenched back and forth like the dismemberment of my family wasn’t enough, and they needed my limbs as trophies. 

The Law Men had hands like vices and such soft voices. I could hear my Mother screaming as they dragged me to the car, not words but sounds from the depths that had no form. I only saw the dogs.

The dogs were sleeping. I only opened the mail app enough to see the "From" line, but it was enough to let the Past in. The email was from Carol. She had tracked me down after a lot of online sleuthing, she said. She sent me photos of her and her family in Alberta. She and Cassie were sent to a family outside of Lethbridge. She gave me little slivers of the Past. 

She and Cassie sleeping tied together with shoelaces in case the Law came back to pull them apart.

The day at the movies when she found out she was Native, watching an old western with her adoptive sister. There was a beautiful indigenous woman on the screen in a ridiculous headdress. “That’s you,” her sister said. 

Finding Mike, working in the oilfields. He didn’t want anything to do with them. “Put all that behind me. Built something good.” He just needed some time, Carol said. 

Finding Mom. There were two photos of her attached to the email. One, between Carol and Cassie, holding them tight. The other, an old one. Her with the dogs at the old house.

Carol asked me why I hadn’t tried to find them. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them. I didn’t want them to see me. I had the undercurrent of an Okie accent and cowboy boots. The closest I ever got to being Native was when we played Cowboys and Indians at school in Oklahoma. I wasn’t even Canadian. I read that dogs tell time through the smell of home on the owner when they return. If they come home and smell a lot like home, the dogs know they haven’t been gone long. If the smell of home has faded, the dogs know they’ve been gone a while. I was afraid if I ever saw my family, they would know how little of home was left on me. 

The dogs were barking. The door opened just a crack, but it was enough to let Family in.