"Loretta Lee (Nôhkom)"
by Jennifer Gossoo

Nôhkom has a blue trailer by the Nicola River.
It don’t feel like a trailer inside.
Nôhkom smokes but don’t open no windows.
I can’t smell a cigarette without thinking of her.

Nôhkom has a garden.
She shows us grandkids how to pinch peapods off the stalk.
Nôhkom knows the coyotes over the fence.
She throws them bones from her marrow stew.

Nôhkom serves orange Tang from a can,
And Kool-Aid Jell-O on white porcelain.
Nôhkom has a box of jellybeans that never empties.
She collects my drawings like some folk collect stamps.

Nôhkom has a small brown face,
And eyes the colour of creekbed clay.
Nôhkom looks light as a straw doll that the wind could carry,
But I seen her chase a griz in her mocs, bangin’ on a trashcan lid.

That was some skookum bear, she tells us later.
He was after my saskatoons!
I don’t think my nôhkom minds, really,
Those skookum bears eating her saskatoons.

Nôhkom seen lights in the sky, once.
She lost them in the dark over Candy Mountain.
Nôhkom never spoke of spirits or spacemen,
But she weren’t the only woman in my family to see lights.

Nôhkom explains about the valley hoodoos:
Men and women turned to earth by the Creator.
My teacher tells it different: erosion and sediment rock.
I like how Nôhkom tells it better.

I reckon Nôhkom cried when Papa died,
But nobody’d let me see.
I sat in the hall and ate green Jell-O from a cup.
It didn’t taste half as good as Nôhkom’s.

Nôhkom had eight daughters.
One daughter became my mother.
One daughter became an angel.
Six others became my aunties,
Women who laugh and holler and cuss like Nôhkom.

My nôhkom loved hummingbirds.
My nôhkom read Where the Wild Things Are in five voices.
My nôhkom showed me a jig in her kitchen,
Wearing a kerchief when the chemo took her hair.
It ended with “gibraltar.”

 

 

 

From The Malahat Review's winter issue #229