In hoc signo vinces[1]
[1] By this sign you shall conquer.
Charlie and Jake sat outside 588 Queen St. West in Toronto on the front steps of the Meeting Place on a splendid May afternoon in 2024. The two first-nations individuals were homeless and alcoholic although Charlie was more into sauce than his companion. They looked anywhere from 30 to 60 years of age, their skins brown, sunburnt, their hands rough from years of doing hard manual labour. Charlie was stalky and Jake was thin; Charlie more garrulous and Jake, more laconic. They had both grown up in the Six Nations of the Grand River reservation in Ontario, their home province. The childhood had been close and then they had gone their ways and found each other some years back. Completing a circle, they had joked to each other.
The stolid, sturdy former Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce building, completed in 1901, and donated to St. Christopher House in 1995, remained silent. Like a traditional banker, it played its cards close to its chest. What did these two individuals bank on to get them through life?
Charlie was deaf in one ear from being an artillery gunner in the Canadian Army when he had been a young pup, bright and eager for adventure, just after finishing high school. His loss of hearing had removed the shine of a military career. From then on, he spiraled downward with a history of odd manual jobs, his loss of hearing and resulting social isolation compelling him to hear voices that others could or even would not.
Jake had never been in the army, dropped out of school. Never liked book learning, although he had paid close attention to the tales that his grandmother had told him when he was growing up. He had spent years on the road, travelling Canada at one point by bicycle. He said he wanted to talk to the land like fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers and further back. Jake had to shout a bit at his friend if Charlie had his deaf side to him. Jake only spoke about such things after the spirit circle sessions held inside the Meeting Place before slipping back into alcohol-induced silence.
Charlie drank to not make Jake feel so bad and to keep an eye on him. Jake could be loud and belligerent when drunk, unlike Charlie who was just more mellow. But Charlie didn’t mind. He and Jake were best buds and he felt he was following the Creator, so to speak, by doing something useful, by helping a friend keep out of trouble. Also, they shared food whenever they had some. In short, they shared good times and bad.
Their lives were fairly uneventful except for the spirit circle sessions with their drumming and chanting. Then something happened that day that slowly and surely would begin to change their lives. It began by them strolling around the building that afternoon.
“Hey Charlie,” Jake said and pointed to something by the trash on the side of the Meeting Place. “Look at this.”
