Chapter Eleven

	“Go away!” Hayley sobbed, at the sound of Jules’s voice outside her bedroom
door.  
	“Hayley, let me in,” Jules said softly from the other side of the door.
	“No! Go away!”  she insisted.
	“I’m not going anywhere, Hayley,” he said.  “I’m going to stand here until you let
me in, so you might as well unlock the door now, as later.  I’ll go get a chair and camp
out  out here if I have to.  You have to come out sooner or later.  When you do, I’ll be
here.”
	There was silence inside the room for several long minutes, then he heard
movement, and in the next instant the lock was turned.  He opened the door to find her
returning to the bed, where she sat slouching and hugging herself. 
	“I know what you’re going to say, Jules, so you don’t have to say it.  I’ll get all
my things packed and ready to go and you can fly me out to Whitehorse in the morning.  I
have enough money in the bank for a plane ticket home, and as soon as I get organized I
will send you repayment for all the clothes you bought me.  I’m not poor.  When I sold
my parent’s house I put the profits into investments.  As soon as the first one becomes
cashable, I’ll repay you every cent I owe you, plus interest.”
	His jaw clenched, again and again as he listened to her. “I already told you there
was no need to repay me for the things I bought you.”  he said, his voice tight. 
	“But I must! I can’t take them and not pay you back, not after I leave here.” She
sobbed.  “After you send me back home.”
	“Why the hell would I make you leave?” he demanded. And she lifted damp eyes
to look at him.
	“Because I ruined everything!” she wailed.  “Your reputation, your lodge —
everything!  Everything you’ve worked all your life for, and now Hector will black list
you and the lodge, and — and — “   She stopped in mid sentence and stared at him. He
was laughing at her!  Of all the reactions she had imagined her tirade downstairs would
bring from him, she had never expected him to laugh at her!  
	“Jules!”  She stared at him.  How could he laugh at a time like this?
	“I’m sorry, Little One. It’s just that — well, I didn’t work all my life for this
lodge.  The last five years, yes, but by no means all my life.” He saw her confusion and
smiled, brushing her face softly with the back of his hand, and sighed and looked
abstractly around the room. “For the last five years, this lodge has been my life.  I’ve
sunk my  heart and soul into it, and it has been the most important thing in my life.  I
would hate to lose it, but there are things I have realized I’d hate to lose even more.”
	“I don’t know what you mean.”  She shook her head, and he sat down beside her. 
	“Hayley, I’m no angel. My life hasn’t always been like this.  The man Carolyn
Shellington married has probably had a more respectable past than I have.”
	Hayley frowned, and her shoulders drooped. “So.  You know then.”
	He nodded.  “About Carolyn? Yes, I know.”
	“So you see, there is no reason to keep up the charade, is there?  You can fire me,
just like you would have if I hadn’t been pretending to be your wife.”
	“I will do no such thing,”  he said flatly.
“But —“
 “Hayley, sending you away from here — letting you out of my sight — is the furthest
thing from my mind right now.  But before we get into that, I need to clear up a few
things about my past.”
	“Why?”  She turned to look at him. 
“Because there are things about me that you need to know,” he said, flatly.
 “Does it really matter anymore?”
	“It matters very much,” he said, his voice catching in his throat as he looked at
her tear stained face.   He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss away her tears, but
there was something he had to do first, now that he had finally decided to do it.  Now that
she had made him realize he needed to do it.  He clasped his hands together on his knees,
more to keep himself from touching her than any other reason, and heaved a heavy sigh.
	“I already told you my father was American, and my mother was Algonquin.” 
She nodded and he went on. “I didn’t have a very easy childhood, Hayley.  It wasn’t like
yours.  My parents weren’t accepted by the community they lived in.  My father was
talked about behind his back for marrying a squaw, and my mother’s people didn’t trust
her white husband.  We couldn’t live on the reserve, because my dad was white, to we
lived in a little shack outside the town.  My dad was a good man, but he was hit hard by
bad times.  He started drinking.”
	Hayley’s eyes widened, and he shook his head.  “No, he never hit her, if that’s
what you’re thinking.  But he drank a lot, and that meant he lost the job he had at the
time. My mother and I would go to the reserve, and I would play with the boys there. 
They were my cousins, mostly.   My father wasn’t welcome but I made friends there.  Us
kids started running into trouble at a young age.  Small stuff mostly.  Vandalism, break
and enter, petty theft.  We stole candy bars, and shoes, and stuff like that.  Sometimes we
just stole stuff to prove that we could.  Later we started stealing cigarettes and booze.
	“The local police knew us all by our first names,” he said, with a chuckle. “But
they didn’t use mine.  The kids were Joshua, and Simon, and Henry — but I was Landon.
They all called me that Landon boy. It was just one more thing that made me realize I
was different. Then two things  changed my life forever. 
	“I was eleven, and as cocky as the rest of them.  I had gone over to the reserve to
hang out, and I was at my cousin Simon’s house.  There were five kids in that family, and
every one of them had a different father.  I didn’t know what that was all about, but I
knew the man my Aunt Margaret was living with wasn’t Simon’s father.”
  He glanced at her.  “That was another thing that made me different from the rest of
them.  My parents, although they were poor,  loved each other, and were happy.  The
only time I’d ever hear them argue was when he was drinking, but even then my mom
would tell me she argued with him because she worried; because she loved him.  
“Anyway, I knew this guy wasn’t Simon’s father because Simon liked to tell everybody
that.  He didn’t like the guy.  He drank a lot, and I’d heard he beat on Margie, but I’d
never seen it. Not until that night.” 
	He heard Hayley gasp, and turned to look at her.  She saw a distant pain in his
eyes, and instinctively reached for his hand as he continued to talk. “That night he was in
a raging drunk, Simon and I could hear him yelling at her from where we were camped
out in the shed in the back smoking stolen cigarettes.  Then I heard it — the sound of him
beating her.  I told Simon to do something, but he wouldn’t.  He was too scared.  It
seemed he acted like a big shot until the stakes got real, then he cowered in the corner.
That was the first time I realized that maybe the police had been right once in a while
about us kids.  Maybe we were just following the gang and not using our own heads.  I
ran in the house and tried to stop him.  He just pushed me aside and kept going.”
	Hayley winced and closed her eyes, squeezing his hand a little tighter.  She
couldn’t bear to even try to imagine the scene.  “What did you do?” she whispered.
	“I did the only thing I could think of.  I went outside and found the first thing I
could lay my hands on to try to get him off her.   It was a metal shovel, and came running
back in swinging, and hit him with it across the back of the head. He went down with a
curse and I ran like hell.”
	“Oh, Jules!” Hayley gasped, a hand over her mouth. She wanted to wrap her arms
around him and hold him, tell him that nightmare was long in the past and could never
hurt him again, but she dared not.  She sensed his story wasn’t finished yet, and she said
nothing more.
	“I ran all the way back to my house, and got my mother.  Margie was my
mother’s youngest sister.  We had an old chevy pick-up back then. Sometimes it worked,
and sometimes it didn’t.  This time it did.  Things were bad enough already, we didn’t
dare take my dad with us, so My mom and I went back to the reserve alone.  By the time
we got there the damn bastard was gone, and Margie was laying in a pool of blood on her
living room floor.  Simon said the guy had gone looking for me.”  He looked up at the
ceiling as if he could see his past there.  “Mom and I got Margie in the truck somehow
and took her to the hospital. She died there two days later.”
	“Oh, Jules, I’m so sorry!”
He sighed, and she saw his shoulders droop as if under a heavy weight. “The police
picked the guy up within days, and charged him.  He blamed me for getting caught,  I
wasn’t so welcome on the reserve any more.  The boys  that I used to think were  my
friends started turning on me.  Even Simon — except when we were alone.”
	“Why? You had tried to help his mother, why would he turn on you?”  Hayley
shook her head, not able to understand.
	“There was a code there, Hayley.  You followed the gang.  You were in, or you
were out. If you were out, life was hard on you.  He had to live with them, so he had to be
in.  I understood that. 
	“A while after Margie died, some men from the reserve came to visit us.  Brothers
of the man that had beat her to death. They were drunk, and they came to teach us a
lesson.”  Hayley saw the pain return to his eyes, just before he looked away again. “All of
us.  My dad, for messing with one of their women, my mom for marrying off the reserve,
and me — for being a white boy.  I was used to white people calling me Indian, but it
was the first time I’d ever had anyone call me a white boy the way they said it. 
	“They tried to get my dad to fight them, I think they wanted to be able to beat him
to death and call it self defense.  He wouldn’t fight, so they left.  That night while we
were sleeping, our little house burned to the ground.”
	“You think they —?”
	“Oh, I know they did it, but nobody has ever proved it.  We all made it out of the
house that night, but not without consequence.  My mother suffered from smoke
inhalation, and  developed pneumonia.  She died a week later.” 
	Hayley gasped. Suddenly sorry seemed so inadequate. She said nothing and let
him continue talking in his low, pained voice.
	“I spent as much time as I could at her bedside that week. I was losing the only
thing that had ever kept me grounded. I was in turmoil. I found myself in a struggle to
figure out who and what I was, and where I belonged. I wasn’t Indian, and they wouldn’t
have me, but I wasn’t white either. Before she died, my mom told me to find my own
path, and not try to define myself by other people’s rules, just be who I was in my heart.”
	He looked at Hayley then, really looked at her. “I’ve never met anyone like her —
til I met you.”
	Hayley blushed, and looked away.  “Your mother sounds like a very strong
woman,” she said, ignoring the reference to herself.  He’d been through so much at such
a young age, and lost the one person that had been his strength.  How could he possibly
have survived to become the calm man he seemed to be today? “What happened next?”
she asked.
	He took a deep breath, as if cleansing himself of the ghosts of the past.  “My dad
and I moved away from there as soon as we could after the funeral.  We had nothing to
keep us there anymore.  He had no family there, and what family I had on the reserve I
couldn’t visit.  I’d meet Simon in the woods sometimes, and he’d give me news of my
grandmother.  She missed me, but nobody else cared.  So, my dad and I hit the road. We
stopped at several places, he’d work a week here, a day there, sometimes even a month.  
Odd jobs to make enough to buy us food.  Summers were good, he could get on with road
crews.  
	“Some might think that everything he’d been through would have driven a
drinking man to drink even more, but he dried out instead.   We wandered for two years,
then he ran into some good luck.  He got a lead on a job up here, and next thing I knew
we were here.  At thirteen I had a real house to live in, and people treated me just like
everybody else.  I found out that up here I could just be me, and not be judged.”  He
turned a wry smile towards her and patted her hand. 
	“I also found out I was smart, although I’d had an inkling of it before but I’d tried
to hide it so I could fit in with the gang.  I went to school, I buckled down, had an
amazing teacher that recognized my potential and I passed top of my class.  I could pretty
much choose where I wanted to go to school after high school, so I went to university in
Vancouver, and studied engineering.  When I graduated, I got a good job in the oil fields
in Alberta, worked hard, and saved my money.  I was driven.  I felt I had something to
prove. I wanted to prove to the world that I wasn’t who they had all said I was, that I
could be somebody.  I never realized until lately that I wasn’t really trying to prove
anything to anyone but myself.”
	“And what about your Dad?  Where is he now?”
	He gave her a long silent look before taking a deep breath and answering her
question.  “My dad died when I was working in Alberta after university, Hayley. He was
working for an exploration company, and he was out in the frozen tundra  way north of
Dawson.  A storm came up and he got separated from the rest of the crew.  He never
made it back, and he froze to death.  When they found him, he was only three hundred
yards from camp.  He hadn’t seen it, and they hadn’t seen him.”
	Hayley let out a cry and turned a startled gaze towards him.  “Oh Jules! I’m so
sorry! That was why you were so upset with me when I was out in the snow that day,
wasn’t it? It made you relive what had happened to your father!”
	He shrugged and smiled at her. “I’m sorry about that.  I may have over reacted.
You probably would have been fine.  The trees were buffering the main brunt of the
storm, and it was nothing like the blizzard that my Dad died in.”
	She shook her head. “If I had known. I never would have gone out there alone.”
“But you didn’t know. You couldn’t have known.  I’ve never told anyone about that part
of my life before, Hayley.”
	They sat in silence for a while as she sorted out all the information he had trusted
her with, and he brooded over the ghosts of his past, finally putting them behind him,
where they belonged.  At last, it was Hayley who broke the silence. 
	“And why the lodge?”
	He straightened, and looked around the room again. “I’d made a lot of money,
and when my dad died I found out he had a big life insurance plan with the company he
was working for. I invested everything, and after a year or two, I decided I wanted a
change and a place like this seemed like the thing to do, not to mention that it used to
belong to the father of a friend of mine I knew from my high school days up here.  When
the father died, Ken didn’t want the place, and he knew I loved the bush.  I had a look,
and said what the heck.”  He shrugged.  “The original building was pretty run down, it
hadn’t been in operation for about six years since Ken’s dad got too old to run it.  I had
most of it torn down. The cabin Marty and Anna live in is what’s left of it. Then I built
this building from the ground up. I built it to be my home more than anything, but
running it as a business keeps an income coming in.”  
	He shot her a sideways glance. “Not that I need one, I have money, Hayley, and I
have other business ventures besides this lodge. But mainly, I wanted to create a memory
to my mother. She would have loved it here. That’s why I named it the GreyWolf.” He
looked at her fully then, and smiled. “Hayley, I haven’t thanked you enough for the
sculpture, it means so much to me.   I’d seen the wolf sculpture at Sidney’s before.  I
used to stand there and admire it, and he’d ask me if I wanted to buy it, and I’d say no. I
would never buy it for myself.  I told him that if I was meant to have it, it would come to
me, and when it did, I would know why.”
	Hayley gasped.  “Sidney told me he’d had it in the store for years. He said he’d
had many offers to buy it, but that he’d told them all it wasn’t for sale — except, when he
found out I was looking for a  Christmas present for you. He said he’d sell it to me, and if
I didn’t buy it, he wouldn’t sell me anything else.”
	Jules broke out in laughter, and squeezed her hand. “Leave it to Sidney!”  he said,
then his eyes locked with hers and he shook his head slowly. “You have no idea what it
meant to me when I opened your gift and saw that very wolf.  Not only that I now had it,
but, that it was you that had given it to me. I suddenly felt like a piece of me that had
been missing all these years had finally come back, that I had been released from a life
long quest.  That you were the one giving me that freedom meant more to me than you
can possibly know.  I didn’t have to prove anything to myself anymore. You gave me the
most precious gift you could ever have given, Little One, you gave me myself back.”
	Hayley didn’t know what to say. She felt a lump in her throat, and quickly turned
away from his eyes. “And you gave me a piece of yourself too.  I will always cherish that
necklace,” she reminded him.
	“Yes,” was all he said, but as he hooked his finger under her chin and turned her
to look at him, he knew that he wanted to give her much, much more of himself than that. 
Slowly his eyes lowered until they lingered on her lips.  Hayley held her breath.  She
wanted him to kiss her so badly she could almost taste it.  She leaned forward ever so
slightly, willing his lips to hers as her heart beat so loud she was certain he must be able
to hear it.