Bone Coulee (24 page)

“It’s lonely to live alone.”

“Mr. Chorniak….”

“Call me Mac. Mr. Chorniak makes it sound as if I’m an old man. Just what do they pay housekeepers in Toronto?”

“I’m guessing a lot more than here.”

“You know, I’m not totally helpless. I could brew up a pot of real coffee, or else I’ll put on a clean pair of jeans and we’ll go to the boutique for some of that
cappuccino.
Make you think that you’re right back in Toronto.”

Jane smiles, this time unreserved.

“If you’re buying. But first these tomatoes.”

“In the bathroom,” Mac says. They stand on each side of an iron-stained toilet bowl, an overripe tomato in each hand. Before dropping them into the bowl, Jane starts to laugh. Mac frowns, and then he laughs. They take turns,
plop, plop,
into the water. They laugh until their eyes fill with tears.

Once they get back to the kitchen, and once they get their composure back, Mac remembers that on the first day he met Jane he had promised that he’d take her on a tour to Bone Coulee. He suggests they do it now, and she agrees.

“Anything to get away from having to clean a toilet bowl,” she says.

Mac turns off the highway
at the Lakeview Cemetery Road sign. On a hilltop, a mile to the west, are caraganas surrounding the cemetery and a peaked-roof shed they see through an opening in the hedge. Once there, they look down on the stink lake with its dull yellow salt along the shore and across the lake to the rise of the Coteau hills, and further up to the sky of fluffy white clouds with breaks of blue. Harvested fields stretch to the north for miles, squared off and divided with rows and rows of caragana hedges, a yard site with a massive row of silver bins. And not only to the north are the squares of fields, but to the south and to the east, the direction from which they’ve come. Duncan’s grain pioneers are buried here, in a place with a view of miles and miles of stubble fields, the stink lake, the hills and the sky.

Neither Mac nor Jane says much of anything, other than Jane’s, “that’s some view,” or Mac’s, “a lot of room with not much
in it.” They were both here for Abner’s interview, but this time they pay more attention to the landscape, and both are quiet, as if lost in their own thoughts. There is no sound at all but the cacophony of thousands of geese and ducks coming from the lake.

A trail leads from the cemetery further west to the lake, and they then turn north, following the shore. The cemetery from here looks even higher on its hill, and they see its one lone spruce tree, scrawny like a jack pine. Along the road, a dozen or so Red Angus cows bunch against a barbwire fence, and on the lakeside brush and swampy grasses grow.

They reach the grid that runs several miles along the lake’s north shore. Here the ditches are filled with the alkali that gives the lake its smell. At the end of the several miles, they turn north up into the hills. Mac had decided they would enter Bone Coulee from its bottom end, where it empties into the stink lake. Up ahead is the monument.

“Now I know where I am,” Jane says.

“Yeah,” Mac says. “For the dedication we came in from the north.”

When he had brought Angela Wilkie out here to bury the skull they had started their look from the top, where they could gaze down the buffalo jump to the coulee floor. Today, he and Jane are starting up from the floor. With the summer rains, the grass has grown to hide the tipi ring stones, and with all the work done preparing the rodeo grounds for the big rally some of the coulee’s natural effects are lost. But the biggest change for Mac is how small he feels looking up, and how big the coulee really is. They drive up and around the steep contours of the coulee’s east side, not talking, Mac concentrating on avoiding rocks hidden in the grass, and Jane with her eyes shut half the time for fear the truck will tip and they’ll end up sharing the fate of the buffalo.

They finally reach the top for their panoramic view of the same squared fields they saw from the cemetery, and the same full view of the stink lake with its thousands of birds, only from further away and higher up. After a time, they work their way back down, where Mac tries to follow the impressions the truck tires made in the grass.

If driving up the coulee made him feel small, trying to find his way down as he loses the tracks makes him feel smaller yet. But
he’s been feeling small all day, bombarded with thoughts of whether or not he should tell Jane about his past. They’ve brought lawn chairs and wieners and a Thermos of coffee, and he’ll gather wood to light a fire in the shelter of the green ash grove. A campfire is settling, and maybe he’ll be able to share a little of himself that
she’s likely heard parts of anyway. Faint rumours.

The grove inside has a certain gloom. With the sun shut out, the ground is a loose black dirt, with a sparse shoot of grass here and there, tiny tree saplings inches high, and nettles. The ash trees are hardly thicker than a man’s thigh, covered with bumps, and some spread at the bottom into a two-foot wide lump. Some of the trees have crooked arms that reach out askew, and many of the trees lean over, bent, all of these pointing in the direction of the buffalo jump, likely as that’s where they see the sun.

Jane skewers a wiener onto her stick and holds it to the fire. She keeps the wiener just away from the flame, letting it blister slowly, not blacken.

“It’s really peaceful here, Mac. We’re like two kids. We should have brought marshmallows.”

“A campfire does that. I think it’s in our genes from when we lived in caves.” Mac mouths lines from Shevchenko:

“In a grove, a grove primaeval, a little house I’ll build….”
Jane looks up at him and smiles, and her face reddens. Mac holds his stick over the fire, and he brushes Jane’s, ever so lightly, then recites another line:

“And you’ll fly to me in the shades….”

“To spend the summer here…I think I’d like that.”

“Really?”

“Like when we lived in caves.”

Mac stands and turns away, both his hands pressed to the bend of a tree. He mutters to himself:

“Those clowns at coffee row must have a story.”

“What did you say, Mac?”

“What you said to me at the house. ‘Those clowns at coffee row must have a story.’”

He can’t look at her.

“I’m one of those clowns. We killed an Indian.”

“Mac…?”

“After a sports day. It was a long time ago.”

Jane stands and reaches to put her hand on his shoulder.

“You can tell me, Mac. It is right that you tell me….”

•
Chapter 27
•

A
t the breakfast table, Mac’s daughter-in-law
can’t decide whether she’s more worried about his behaviour or that of her son, and as on most other mornings, her husband is no listener.

“No orange juice?” he asks.

“Garth drank the last of it.”

“He’s up and gone? I thought he was still in bed.”

“He went to town to find out which bull he’s riding this after
noon. You can pick up some more juice at the Co-op this morning
when you go in to see your father.”

“I’m going to see Dad? What for?”

“You’ve got to do something, Lee. I’m worried about him, and now with this moose thing. Mac’s been going downhill ever since your mother died.”

Lee puts two slices of multi-grain bread into the toaster, takes a jug of milk from the fridge and fills his glass.

“Imagine, face down in the gut pile.”

“You weren’t there, Darlene.”

“Jen Holt told me.”

“Dad made his point. Holt’s yard is Indian land.”

“Yes, and the next thing we’ll know is that our land is Indian land.”

“Is that what you’re hearing on the election trail?”

“Angela’s brother makes no bones about it. They’re in the market to buy land. The next thing will be expropriation.”

“The more they want to buy, the higher the price gets. I see nothing wrong with that.”

“Do you think I did the right thing in starting up the boutique?”

“In Duncan? You know what they say: ‘Duncan’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.’”

“And with the election, and taking my class, the boutique’s closed half the time.”

“Get Angela’s mother to run it when you can’t be there.”

“Are you kidding? She can’t even walk. I wonder if Esther would do it?”

“Ask her.”

“And what about Garth and Angela? People are talking.”

“He could do worse.”

“I don’t know about this new generation.”

“So what do you want me to say to Dad?”

“Oh, Lee, I don’t know what I’m saying…. The toast is burning!”
She flips the toaster, scrapes the toast and butters it.

“Strawberry jam or marmalade?”

“Jam,” Lee says.

Darlene gets a jar from the fridge and joins him at the table.

“Do you think Mac is getting Alzheimer’s?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Darlene. He’s as wily as a fox.”

Darlene takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. Normally she wears contacts, but when she first gets out of bed she doesn’t like putting them in.

“You really should get signing powers. What do they call it?”

“Power of attorney. There’s no possible way he’d ever sign over his power of attorney. And why should he? I wouldn’t if I were in his boots.”

“What are we going to do with Garth?”

“What do you mean? What can we do with him?”

“I mean concerning Angela.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Angela.”

“But she’s Indian!”

“That’s right, Indian.”

“I suppose you being Ukrainian and Irish, it doesn’t matter to you, but it does matter to me.”

“That’s the least of our worries, Darlene. I’ve heard a few other things; rumours we don’t want to hear about.”

“About the Wilkies?”

“If there’s anything to it, I’ll let you know. If you don’t hear first.”

“Ask your father if he will sit up with the dignitaries tonight.”

Lee scratches his forehead, wipes thinning hair to one side, then dons his Viterra Grain Company cap. He puts a toothpick in his mouth, works the peak of his cap back and forth, and pushes away from the dinette.

“I better hurry if I want to get back in time for the rodeo. Are you going?”

“Not if Garth happens to pick Tom Tom. I couldn’t stand to watch.”

“I’ll see if Dad wants to come. It would be a long day for him…rodeo this afternoon, then out there again tonight for the light show.”

Lee rings the doorbell twice,
then tries the door and it’s not locked. He goes into the house to find Mac adjusting his chair to its upright position.

“You caught me catching a few winks,” Mac says. “I heard the doorbell, and then I thought it might be Abner.”

“I had to come to town to pick up a few things for Darlene, and she asked me to ask you if you will sit up on the stage with the dignitaries tonight.” says Lee.

“As long as I don’t have to stand up and say anything. There’ll be enough hot air as is.”

“And are you coming out this afternoon?”

“That’s why I’m trying to catch some sleep this morning. I wouldn’t want to miss out on seeing Garth ride.”

Lee sits on the couch across the room from the La-Z-Boy. He takes off his cap and sets it on his knee.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you that I’m sorry about the other night.”

“I suppose I’m a bit sorry myself, but worse things have happened. No harm done.”

“That’s right, no harm done, other than all the gossip. Darlene’s a bit touchy about the gossip.”

“The benefits of living in the country, where everybody knows everybody else’s business.”

Lee puts his cap back on his head, and he pulls down on the peak. “Yeah, well, I should be going and let you sleep some more.”

“What gossip?”

“You know, Dad, you’ve never told me about the sports day fight.”

Mac freezes upright on his chair for a moment or two, then with his hand on the lever he eases back, his feet straight out, and he sinks deeper into the chair, his face turned away.

“Leave well enough alone,” he says.

“Then there’s something to it? Do you think the Wilkies…?”

“The past is buried,” Mac says. “Leave it buried.”

Lee gets off the couch and walks over to gaze out the living room window to the schoolyard, where every fair day the parade assembles. The parades go back a long way, long before Lee was born, even before his father was born. Duncan has a reputation for the
big show,
just like it will be tonight out at Bone Coulee.

“So you’re coming tonight?”

“I said, as long as I don’t have to stand up and say anything.”

“Then you’d better get some more sleep.”