Bone Coulee (17 page)

“But you didn’t know, and right now that is all that matters. Let’s quit talking about it. Let’s leave it alone for now.”

Angela reaches forward. With her fingers at the arch of his boot, she rubs the denim hem of his pant leg. He looks at her, but her eyes are lowered. A strand of her hair falls curling down to her mouth. She blows at the hair, her lips making a popping sound. Garth tugs a branch of creeping juniper from the ground. He holds it to his nose, then extends the branch forward, brushing Angela’s bare arm.

“You gonna try some Mike’s Hard Berry Cooler?”

“I don’t need a cooler; I need a sweater.” Angela looks skyward to the splatter of white clouds. “Or I need the sun to break through the clouds.”

“Here. My coat.” Garth takes off his denim jacket and drapes it over her shoulders, letting his hands stray along her back.

“You are warm,” she says. His ear touches hers, and he drops the juniper branch. They hear the horse grazing. They can hear the crisp rip of grass, can see the folds of the horse’s mouth inching this way and that, as if massaging the turf.

•
Chapter 18
•

R
oseanna is starting to feel that she is missing
out on things. Her son gets to drive all over the country, and her daughter gets to ride all day in a Red River cart. Both Glen and Angela know that she must get lonesome sitting in the backyard talking to an owl. It would do her some good if she could get out to see some country, and on a day when Glen has to attend to some land business, the opportunity arises.

“A different car?” Roseanna asks as Angela and Glen help her out of the house. Glen has driven his ’87 New Yorker up close to the back step. They are going to drive out to the land that Three Crows has purchased from Abner and Jen Holt. Glen wants to get a better handle on what the band should be charging to rent the land out
.

“Some rig, eh?” Glen says.

“Where did you get it?” Angela asks.

“An old lady in Saskatoon. The car sat in her garage for eleven years after her husband died. Only 79,000 kilometres. Look at all the room for you in the back seat, Mother.”

“What is that contraption for?” Roseanna says as Glen helps her into the car.

“A wheelchair,” Glen says.

“It’s too hard for you to get around with your walker,” Angela says.

“You’ll have to push me. What good is that? You think I’m a cripple or something?”

“You don’t have to use it in the house,” Angela says. “But when we go somewhere it will be easier for you to get around, and safer.”

“We’ll be back this afternoon? I want to watch them knock down the elevator.”

“We’ll be back in time for lunch at the café, and then we’ll watch the demolition. I want to sketch it as it collapses.”

“Your owl is making short work of those gophers,” Glen says. His son, Tommy, had snared two of them and sent them with Glen. “You think it is ever going to fly again?”

“It’s not my owl,” Roseanna says.

“Now Mother, we know you like it,” Glen says.

“Death bird,” Roseanna says.

When they drive up the lane
to the Holts’ abandoned farmyard, they spot the moose that Mac and Abner had seen, but not only the cow with its calf. They also see a huge bull moose.

“Look at the size of that bull!” Glen says. “And the horns!”

“People around here see them as pets,” Angela says.

“Next time I come, I’ll bring my rifle.”

As for the real purpose of their drive out here, there’s not a lot that Glen can learn regarding how much Three Crows should ask for rent. One stubble field looks the same as the next, and really, the issue is not so much about how much rent to charge as about how much Indians should be paying for more land. Bone Coulee is of special interest to them, not so much for the grain land, but for the coulee itself, and what it represents.

“Do you think Mac Chorniak would sell it?” Glen asks Angela.

“He likes to think he’s preserving heritage,” Angela says. “But selling is another matter.”

“He keeps the duck,” Roseanna says.

“Keep working on him,” Glen says.

“She would rather work on his grandson,” Roseanna says.

“Don’t you think that Uncle Thomas’s death has to be resolved before anything happens?” Angela asks. “It should have been dealt with long before now.”

“Like everything else,” Glen says.

“All we do is talk and do nothing,” Roseanna says. “You should do something, Glen.”

“You know the mess as well as I do, Mother. Some of our people were paid off to keep their mouths shut.”

“So you keep yours shut?”

“Let’s not fight,” Angela says. “And let’s get back to town. I want to sketch the elevator.”

When the Wilkies come through
the door of the café, coffee row hunches around its tables, like wagons in a circle. Pete glances over his shoulder, then quickly avoids Roseanna’s stare. Esther Rawling and Jen sip tea at the window table.

Everyone is here preparing to witness the final demise of their last remaining elevator, and as Pete would tell it, just one more swindle by the money men who started all the schemes in the first place.

“Where there’s a swindle,” Pete says, “you’ll find a Scotsman. MacKenzie and Mann started the Grand Trunk Pacific with just $5,000 of their own money. Hey?”

Sid rolls his eyes, then stands to walk over to the window where Esther and Jen sit. He looks up and down the street, as if expecting the arrival of a train. The others lean their heads forward, listening to Pete, who now talks loudly enough for everyone to hear.

“They formed the railway company, another company to build stations, one more for the ties and timbers. Hey? Hey? Even another company to manufacture the steel rails.” Pete pauses to stare at his empty cup, waiting for Tung Yee to fill it.

“Anyone else, coffee?” she asks.

“Each company sold supplies at high prices to the Grand Trunk Pacific, and MacKenzie and Mann asked the federal government for more money to pay the bills so they could finish the project.”

“They finally went broke?” Mac asks.

“Bankrupt,” Pete says. “But that’s not my point. Only Grand Trunk Pacific went broke. That railway was then nationalized by the federal government to form the CNR, which, against all rules of bankruptcy, was charged to carry a loan to pay off all the creditors; all of Mackenzie and Mann’s other companies. Every year the CN paid eighty million dollars a year interest on that loan. Then, over half a century later, Brian Mulroney sold the CNR, but before he did that, he let the government pay off the loan in full so that the new CN wouldn’t be saddled with the debt.”

“Wouldn’t have happened if the NDP was the government,” Abner says.

“Wouldn’t have had a railroad, either,” Nick says.

“Wrecking crew’s arrived,” Mac says, tugging at the peak of his cap. “I see they are unloading the trackhoe.” The men drop coins on the table and follow Mac out of the café.

People gather along the sidewalk. Abner joins Mac in front of the old pool hall/new boutique-in-progress. Jeepers, Nick and Pete go the other way towards the hotel. Tung Yee and her husband stand at the door of the café. Sid talks to Glen about the workings of municipal government, and the similarities between band, village and municipal councils. They discuss the tourism potential of Lake Diefenbaker and the part each council may play in its development. Esther and Jen converse with Darlene and Jane, who have just arrived. Angela walks up and down the sidewalk, studying the scene from different angles. Roseanna sits by herself in her new wheelchair.

“At one time there were five elevators,” Esther says.

“Weren’t there six?” Jen says.

“That’s right,” Esther says. “Parish and Heimbecker had two. The men didn’t sit those years all day in the café. They sat in an elevator office, and it wasn’t always coffee they were drinking.”

“Not Abner,” Jen says.

This is the moment for Angela, and she prays for the spirits to guide her:

The grain boss stands astride the plain.

His business gone, the wrecking ball bowls into his groin,

and he buckles at his knees.

The trackhoe lurches forward and begins to slash at the building’s undersides, like a coyote ripping into an animal’s belly. The grain spout dangles from the building. Like a spent phallus, the spout flops down on the grapple forks, limp.

The building shakes like an old man grain boss in the throes of his Parkinson’s, fighting in a momentary recall of his youth. Angela imagines him stepping into a dance, as in a Charlie Chaplin film, a man-about-town with one too many drinks. Dinner jacket, silk tie, bowler hat, in one hand a drink with a cherry, in the other a cigar. He groans to the sound of the trackhoe engine, the clatter of its cleats, the crunch of splintering lumber. The trackhoe skids and turns, backs and plunges. The forks of the bucket bob in the air, thrust to prod and tear like a coyote ripping out intestines. The elevator topples to the east, falls hard to shake the earth and exhales its final puffs of dust.

“What do you think?” Darlene asks Roseanna.

“Makes everything even.”

“Even?”

“Flattens everything,” Roseanna says.

•
Chapter 19
•

J
ust as the collapse of an elevator could be said to
symbolize the end of an era, so could an auction sale, especially the one Mac and his friends attend the day after the demolition. Mac is a history buff, but his main reason not to miss this sale is his hope to buy a relic that might get Roseanna Wilkie off his back. With all her harping about the stone duck, he’s got to do something. He wants to quit being bothered with thinking about having to part with a treasure he’s found on his own land. The sale booklet lists arrowheads, but Mac has heard that it might be illegal to sell them. Best of all would be a peace pipe, but he’s never heard of anybody having ever come across one of those.

Mac has attended his share of auction sales, but nothing even close to the scale of this one. There are buyers from as far away as New York. The sale booklet is one thing, but seeing the stuff is another thing altogether. Five steel Quonsets are jammed full of stuff, as well as sixteen wooden granaries and a barn. Its huge loft has two floors, with barely room to walk between the display cases. Bud Harrison had hauled into his yard an old general store he got from the hamlet of Ardath, a BA bulk oil shed from some other ghost town, a schoolhouse, fire hall, two threshing gang cookshacks on wheels and a railway station. He even laid down track for a caboose. All that’s missing is a church.

His nephew is selling it all. Rows and rows of tractors – John Deere, Oliver, Massey, Minneapolis Moline…and tractors Mac has never heard of…a Gibson. Stationary engines are stacked in a pile as high as a house.

“Buy one! Take them all!” The auctioneer holds up a motor-oil bottle with a screw-on spout. “What am I bid? What am I bid? Seventy-five dollars! Do I hear a hundred, hundred, hundred…?”

Sid climbs up on a Case steam engine, and Jeepers takes his picture.

“It’s all here,” Abner says. “Saskatchewan’s history. From this big steamer down to one-furrow sulky plows.”

“An engine like this pulled a twenty-furrow gang plow,” Sid says. “Cut through the prairie like a hot knife through butter.”

“My grandfather walked behind a one-furrow plow,” Jeepers says. “He had it hitched to three horses.”

“Didn’t those Ukrainians hitch their wives to the plow?” Pete says.

“Maybe Doukhobors,” Jeepers says, “I don’t know.”

Mac examines stacks and stacks of scrap iron: blacksmith forges, trip-hammers, seed cleaners…every kind of seeding, plowing, fixing and harvesting device imaginable. Mounds of rusted iron. He sees a pile of lightning rods and weather vanes like the ones on Lee’s barn.

Oak-framed glass display cases stand in rows on each side of the second-tier walkway in the loft of Harrison’s barn. Three cases are full of brass harness bells. Seven other cases are filled with brass oilers that look like a Russian tsarina’s collection of gold-encased Easter eggs. The brass-encased cylinders are glass, so an operator could gauge the level of the oil as it dripped into an engine.

The coffee-rowers sit with the crowd on the bleachers. A BobCat lifts a brass bell. One side of it is embossed with the manufacturer’s name in German print, and on the other side it reads, “Potter’s Church Supplies, Winnipeg”. The bell sells for $3,700 to an old couple sitting beside Nick.

“Where you from?” Nick asks.

“Lethbridge,” the man says.

“You a dealer? Collector?”

“We thought it would look nice in our front yard,” the woman says.

A spotter holds up a life-sized tin sign of a policeman in blue, with the words Coca-Cola, and a brown Coke bottle on it.

“Sold one of these last month in Atlanta, Georgia,” the auctioneer says. “$3,500.”

This one sells for $2,700, and it goes to Atlanta, Georgia.

Mac is waiting for the arrowheads. They’re listed in the booklet, but he hasn’t seen them anywhere. But with the prices this stuff is fetching, maybe it’s a good thing the arrowheads don’t show up. A cast-iron Police Order sign with two pie-plate circles stacked one over the other reads “Keep Right”. It sells for $2,400. A gas pump with twin BA globes sells for $10,000. A Model T Ford sells for $23,000. The buyer tells the auctioneer that he’s bidding for his son who’s an oil broker in Calgary. Shell Oil quart bottles with screw-on spouts sell for $300 each.