Bone Coulee (16 page)

For a tense five minutes nothing much happens. They talk about the weather, how much crop is still out, how come these last few years the moose have moved down from the north, how many American goose hunters are up this fall, how much hot air there is on the radio and television with the election on and how they wished it would be over and done with. If the lady wants politics, Eddy Huff and Lee have to show up at the café any moment now for some more planning for the Bone Coulee rally. But the unexpected happens. The first thing Lee does when they arrive is ask the media to leave.

“If you don’t mind,” he says. “We’re going to have a little business meeting that’s not really suited for camera. You know, election strategy? If you’d care to wait outside, or you might want to do some filming up at the school. You might want something on school closure, a hot topic in rural Saskatchewan.” Eddy Huff is all smiles, and he tells Jane to come back to the café in an hour.

The election campaign is running hot for the Sask Party, especially in the rural areas where it’s guaranteed to be a complete washout for the NDP. Donations are coming in from all over Canada, and especially from Alberta. Locally, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if the Sask Party took over eighty percent of the vote; the municipal councillors are completely onside, and it’s rumoured that even the schoolteachers are going to vote Sask Party.

The café meeting is to finalize plans to capitalize all they can on the Bone Coulee Rodeo. As Darlene has been telling them, the
country/western style dominates the entertainment industry. Dress Eddy up in boots, jeans and hat; even a black hat to take away a little from Pastor Eddy’s “Little Goody Two-shoes” reputation.

Lee opens a binder full of papers, laying them out on the coffee row table. “I set up a meeting with the RM Council. We need the equipment for the work bee starting Saturday, and we’ll need volunteers.”

“What time is it?” Nick says, looking up at the café clock. “My goodness! Half past ten. I’ve got a B-train coming out from Saskatoon to load durum. I’m supposed to meet him at the bins at eleven. Want to come with me, Jeepers?”

Jeepers stares at Lee’s papers, fidgets with the peak of his cap, then follows Nick out of the café.

“Don’t put your back out shovelling,” Pete says, and he spits the toothpick he’s been chewing on into his empty cup.

“Why do you need the RM equipment?” Mac says. “You don’t need to build up any grade. You can get vehicles down that trail just as it is. Unless it rains. You build up a road grade, it will be a worse mess if it rains.”

“Mac’s right,” Abner says.

“Everybody drives down there for rodeo,” Mac says. “Just the way it is. We’ve done the same for years.”

“We got money from the Federal Millennium Fund,” Lee says. “And the Provincial Heritage Foundation. And if we tear down the old corrals that are collapsing anyway, and build new ones further away from the spring water, we can get a grant from the Department of the Environment.”

“Thanks to the Harper government,” Sid says.

“The light show will be our biggest expense,” Eddy says. “Not every day do you recruit a Disney World producer.”

“Another Saskatchewan expatriate,” Sid says. “That’s this socialist province. Any young man with brains leaves.”

“That’s been our problem all along,” Mac says. “All that are left are the ones with no brains.”

“When the Sask Party wins, they’ll come back,” Pete says. “You’ll see.”

“They’ve already been coming back these past four years,” Abner says. “Under an NDP government.”

“You still here, Abner?” Sid says. “How come you’re not out on the campaign trail with Johnny Puff and his Green Car?”

“I might just do that this afternoon,” Abner says. “Let people know that the NDP has more to offer than the Sask Party’s free beer and pizza.”

“What about beer?” Pete asks. “Are we going to set up a beer tent?”

“I don’t think we should,” Lee says. “It wouldn’t look good with Pastor Eddy as our candidate.”

“That’s up to the rodeo committee,” Eddy says. “Not up to us.”

“Beer tent’s a big money-maker,” Sid says.

“In the old days, people brought their own beer,” Mac says.

“We’ll leave it up to the rodeo committee,” Lee says. “I’m on that committee. Maybe Sid has a point. We’ll need the extra money to help pay for the light show. Have we got everything straight? Rodeo Friday night and Saturday afternoon. Disney World light show Saturday night with fireworks. Christian cowboy church service Sunday morning. Rodeo finals Sunday afternoon. This Saturday we go full bore. We’ve only got two weeks left to get that grade built into the coulee.”

•
Chapter 17
•

B
ut the Indians don’t leave the province, and the
way Garth Chorniak has been hanging around Angela, it doesn’t look as if he will either.

“Glen left the cart with you?” Angela asks.

“Yeah,” Garth says, “and he said to go ahead and use it. He said that you might enjoy a ride in the coulee. I’m storing it in the barn for him until he needs it for next year’s Batoche Days.”

“Can’t you just imagine? My very own kokum was a child riding in a cart like this, and right here, one hundred years ago. Right where we are.”

Garth and Angela follow a trail along the bottom of the coulee towards the stink lake. It’s mid-morning, and flock after flock of geese fly overhead, returning from their morning feed. They hover at the mouth of the coulee, looping round and round as they descend to the water.

Angela has her sketchbook open, deciding whether or not to draw the birds, but then she closes it and stuffs it into her carrying bag. She wonders what Garth knows about the murder of her uncle Thomas, and all at once she feels like a traitor to be down here on a joyride with a Chorniak.

“Whoa, Dan. Whoa.” The horse is Garth’s pet, his big quarter-horse gelding hitched to the shafts of Glen Wilkie’s Red River cart. “Will you look at that! More tipi rings, and one big one. Twice as big as the others. Must be a chief! Do you think so, Angela?”

“I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Might they have had a tent for horses?”

“I think it’s unlikely, but I don’t know for sure.”

“Let’s stop here and give Dan a rest. The way he’s been trying to grab a bite of grass along the way, he’s likely hungry. I’ll unhitch and let him graze.”

“You don’t think he’ll take off?”

“He might if we were closer to home. But down here he’ll stick close to the cart.”

“It would be a long walk…, for us.”

Garth spreads a blanket on the grass and he lies down, his chin cupped in his hands. Angela sits beside him.

“That big tipi ring,” he says. “Must be somebody special.”

“A sacred place. All of this, a sacred place.”

“You could have a big rally down here, like the Easter pageant in the Black Hills in South Dakota.”

“That’s the same thing as what the black robes
always
used to do to our people; put on an Easter pageant in the same place where the last of our buffalo disappeared. No Easter pageant here. This coulee is its own pageant.”

“Wait till you see the light show,” Garth says.

“The stars in the sky are enough,” Angela says.

“You sure are some back-to-nature person,” Garth says.

“There is not much prairie left,” Angela says. “Everything is plowed.”

“Grandpa has an old Ukrainian story about unplowed land. It’s a story from the Hutsuls, who were some kind of hillbilly mountain people. They said that at the beginning of the world there was only water. One day God was walking on the water, and he noticed something whirling in a foam.”

“The Cree have a creation story where everything was water,” Angela says.

“I know. The trickster, Whiskey-Jack and Muskrat.”

“That’s one of the stories. I know of two. The other is where Coyote asks four ducks to dive to the bottom for mud.”

“The Ukrainians have God and the Devil.
Who art thou?
God asked the thing whirling in the foam.
I am Aridnyk,
the Devil answered.
I’m alive, but I cannot walk.
God gave him arms and legs, and the two of them went about as sworn brothers. But when they became tired of walking on the water, God decided to make land, but he couldn’t get clay from the bottom of the sea. God knew everything in the world, but he wasn’t much good at doing anything. But the Devil had the power to do anything, and he said,
I could dive down there.
Then dive down,
God answered. So the Devil dove down, picked up a handful of clay and put the rest in his mouth. God took the clay from the Devil’s hand and scattered it, blessing the earth, and everything grew. But the clay in the Devil’s mouth also grew. It grew and grew until it forced the Devil’s mouth open. He couldn’t breathe, and his eyes bulged out.
Spit,
God said. The Devil spit and spit, and wherever he spit, mountains grew.”

“I see,” Angela says. “So it’s God’s land for grain, and the Devil’s land for grazing.”

“Kind of a reversal of Cain and Abel, Grandpa tells me.” Garth goes to the cart for a lunch cooler. He sets it on the blanket and takes out a bottle.

“Mike’s Hard Berry Vodka Cooler,” he says, and lifts the bottle in the air. Angela takes it from him and sets it down on the blanket. Her thoughts shift back in time. She tries to visualize a young Mac Chorniak. She looks at Garth and tries to compare, tries to imagine Garth as a murderer.

“Your grandfather can’t be much of a religious man, with a story like that.”

“I don’t know, but he told me that when he was boy his family had to go a long way at Easter to attend a Ukrainian church. You see all kinds of them with the big onion domes along the Yellowhead Highway, all the way from Yorkton to Edmonton. Before Grandma Peggy died, she insisted that she be buried on the Catholic side of the cemetery. She didn’t want her bones to spend eternity lying in the same ground as some Protestant Orangeman. Grandpa says it doesn’t matter to him whose ground it is, as long as they plant him beside Grandma Peggy.”

Garth puts his hand on Angela’s shoulder, but she draws herself away from him.

“How much more do you know about your grandfather?”

“Like what?”

“Things he did when he was young. Did he play sports?”

“I know he liked to hunt. Mostly deer. I know that he didn’t bother with geese, but he says there really weren’t any geese to hunt back then. Only ducks. He hates ducks. He says he lost a lot of crop to ducks in the wet fifties.”

“Did he play baseball?”

“He says that he used to pitch, but he doesn’t talk much about it.”

Angela gets off the blanket and walks over to the centre of the big tipi ring.

“Do you know about the murder?”

“What?”

“The sports day in 1950. An Indian was killed.”

“Murdered?”

More and more geese swirl down from the sky, wings spread at odd angles, turning sharply in a cacophony of sound. Garth looks up at this distraction.

“An Indian was killed at the Duncan Sports Day?”

“Then you don’t know.”

“Don’t know what? Angela, what has this got to do with Grandpa and baseball?”

“Everything.” Angela leaves the circle and sits back down on the blanket, face to face with Garth. “There was a fight.”

She tells Garth about her uncle Thomas. She names the ballplayers who were there. Angela’s mother was there, and Mac Chorniak.

“Grandpa? Do my parents know of this?”

“It was so long ago. Over fifty years. Your parents weren’t even born. I don’t know how well white men keep secrets. Not even a lot of our people know at Three Crows, but some do. And not everybody there is innocent. One Elder says that the white men’s lawyer paid off certain important Indians to raise doubts at the trial.”

Garth rises to his feet and walks around to the far side of the Red River cart.

“The Chorniaks. I’m a Chorniak. It’s supposed to be a good name around here. A name people respect. I was getting to think about you and me…what people might think about me hanging out with someone like you. The whole
race
thing. Here was me thinking that I’ve got a family reputation to protect. I’m a fool. I see now that you coming to live here in Duncan was not just because of the job in Bad Hills.”

“It’s mostly my mother. She wants to make things right no matter how long it takes. She wants those men at least to acknowledge what they did.”

“Do they have a clue who you are?”

“I don’t think so, but maybe they do. Maybe they are getting a little suspicious. Mother is waiting for just the right time to confront your grandfather.”

Garth walks away from the wagon, further away from Angela, to his horse. “Hey, Dan,” he says. “Good old trustworthy Dan. To trust somebody like me.” He reaches down and grabs a handful of grass. Dan nibbles at it, and presses in close to nudge Garth’s chest.

“Gee, Angela, I’m sorry,” Garth says, returning to the blanket. “How do you fix something like that? Glen knew all along? And here he lets me use his cart. Lets me bring you down here. You let me bring you down here.”