Starlight

Starlight is the final, unfinished novel by Ojibway writer Richard Wagamese, published posthumously in 2018 after his death in March 2017.

In 1976, twenty-year-old Franklin "Frank" Starlight, an Indigenous man raised on an eighty-acre farm in the Nechako Valley of British Columbia, returns from a small funeral carrying a brass urn. The ashes belong to the old man, his non-biological father who raised him. Starlight walks the nearby town, finding memories of the old man at every turn. Back at the farm, he cleans the house, keeps a few personal items, and carries the urn to a shelf in the barn's tack room, a place the old man loved. He drives to the end of the driveway, intending to leave and see the wider world. At the road, he pauses. The farm feels empty without the old man, yet the world beyond feels equally directionless. He makes a U-turn and drives back, contented in choosing to stay.

Four years later, in 1980, a woman named Emmy waits in the dark bush outside a remote cabin with her daughter Winnie, approximately eight years old. They watch the last guests leave a drunken gathering hosted by Jeff Cadotte, Emmy's violent partner of three years, and his associate Anderson. Cadotte has beaten Emmy, allowed other men to assault her, and threatened Winnie. Once the men pass out, Emmy and Winnie creep inside to gather supplies and the truck keys. When Emmy tries to steal Cadotte's cash, she trips on a bottle and wakes him. She strikes him with a heavy cudgel, breaking his nose, while Winnie smashes bottles into Anderson's legs. Before fleeing, Emmy opens the woodstove grate so embers spit across the dry wooden floor, deliberately setting the cabin ablaze.

Meanwhile, Starlight has settled into life on the farm with Eugene Roth, a skinny, garrulous hired hand who has become his closest friend. They work by hand, honoring the old man's traditional methods. Starlight spends nights alone in the backcountry, running alongside wolf packs in hand-stitched moose-hide moccasins and photographing them by moonlight. His agent, Elmer Deacon, a local photographer, sells the portraits to magazines and galleries and urges Starlight to attend an exhibition of his work in Vancouver. Starlight declines, insisting he is a farmer, not a public figure.

Emmy drives through the night with no plan beyond escape. Her father sexually abused her, and her mother left after a beating while Emmy hid inside a cedar chest, never to return. Raised as an orphan and foster child, Emmy cycled through relationships with abusive men, believing she deserved nothing better. Winnie was born to an earlier partner who abandoned them. Fleeing north through British Columbia, Emmy and Winnie survive by siphoning gas and stealing food. A rancher named Viv Anders gives them work, fuel, cash, and advice: Stop running and give Winnie a home. Emmy drives northwest toward the remote town of Endako.

Cadotte and Anderson survive the cabin fire. After days in the hospital, they vow to hunt Emmy down. Cadotte declares it a killing mission. They head for Calgary and search low-end bars, bootleggers, country bars, and welfare offices, working day jobs to fund the pursuit. Their search spirals through Edmonton, Red Deer, and Lethbridge before turning toward British Columbia. Cadotte's violence escalates as he provokes fights and stalks women at night. Anderson privately yearns for peace but cannot break free of Cadotte's influence.

Near Endako, Emmy finds an abandoned farmhouse hidden from the road by windbreak poplars. She scrubs the house clean and tells Winnie this is home. But money and food run out. Desperate, Emmy attempts to shoplift groceries while Winnie creates a diversion. Winnie panics and the plan collapses. Store security catches Emmy. In the office upstairs, Officer Jensen explains that shoplifting charges could send Emmy to jail and Winnie to foster care.

Frank Starlight, who has been shopping in the store, quietly intervenes. He offers to pay for the groceries and proposes that Emmy work as his housekeeper in exchange for room and board, with Child Services oversight to ensure Winnie enrolls in school. When Emmy asks why, he answers: "For the girl. And because I guess I'm drawn to wild things" (76).

Emmy, Winnie, Roth, and Starlight settle into an uneasy domesticity. Emmy transforms the cluttered bachelor house with appliances, curtains, and houseplants. That first night, Starlight and Roth creep upstairs with quilts and drape them over the sleeping mother and daughter before retreating to their own rooms. In town, Starlight faces casual racism when a man warns him that locals are uneasy about an Indigenous man living with a white woman. Starlight responds firmly that he has never given anyone cause for concern.

When social worker Madelaine "Maddie" Orr reports that Winnie has been fighting boys at school, she asks Starlight to take the girl onto the land, hoping its peace might heal the trauma behind the aggression. He agrees and begins teaching both Emmy and Winnie new ways of seeing, walking, and listening: wide peripheral vision, the stalking "cougar prowl," and the practice of pushing one's hearing outward until the land fills the listener completely. Emmy advances rapidly, learning to move silently, stalk deer alone, and catch fish with a pronged sapling. One morning, Winnie watches Starlight stand motionless in a meadow until a buck walks to him and allows itself to be touched. Later, Emmy accomplishes the same feat, placing her palm on a doe's flank and weeping silently. Starlight opens his arms and she cries against his chest.

The land transforms them both. Emmy tells Starlight the lessons were really about teaching her to listen to herself. He tells her that people are "unbroken country" too: unknown territory where one can lose oneself in what one finds. One evening in the barn, Emmy kisses him softly. It is his first kiss. He compares their bond to a rescue mare he patiently walked back to health, never trying to change her, just letting her find herself.

Starlight finally agrees to attend the Vancouver gallery exhibition, bringing Roth, Emmy, and Winnie. At the gallery, he stands before over a hundred people and speaks from the heart, telling them the land is his mother, his temple, and his only prayer, that tracking an animal means following yourself, and that "love is unbroken country" (225). The audience responds with thunderous applause. Emmy hugs him, weeping.

As they walk through Vancouver that evening, Emmy kisses Starlight at a street corner. Neither of them sees the two hulking men following slowly behind. The novel's final complete chapter opens with Cadotte in a dingy bar, declaring that he has tracked Emmy down.

The novel breaks off here. A publisher's note explains that Wagamese intended Frank and Emmy to share a tender love scene before returning to the farm. Cadotte and Anderson were to follow them and be lured into the backcountry, where they would be tracked and restrained. Emmy, armed with a knife, confronts her abusers but ultimately shows mercy, guided by Frank's influence. Wagamese believed that "despite everything, every horror, it is possible to move forward and to learn how to leave hurt behind" (229). An epilogue adapted from an earlier Wagamese novella depicts a man and a girl running silently behind a wolf pack through moonlit terrain. The girl photographs the wolves and disappears into the trees. The man smiles and runs after her. Wagamese intended the novel's final line to be "And then they began to run" (230).