Bone Coulee (6 page)

“Well, Mac?” Sid says. “Didn’t Abner say that some Glen guy from the Three Crows Nation was looking to buy his farm?”

“With our money,” Jeepers says.

“Get rid of the NDP in Regina,” Pete says. “With Harper in Ottawa, things’ll change.”

Nick leans forward, head to head with Mac. “You sure they haven’t been after you to sell? You know, the buffalo jump? That’s right up their alley when it comes to heritage.”

“Seen that Indian girl moved in next door to you?” Pete asks.

“Which one?” Mac says.

“The young one’s an artist,” Sid says.

As if Sid would know anything about art. But as Duncan's mayor, he's attended meetings with the regional development officer in Bad Hills.

“She teaches art," Sid says. "At the regional college. They’re offering a course on making baskets out of willow.”

“I wonder what they’re up to, moving into Duncan?” Pete says.

“The Indians can buy my place,” Jeepers says.

“I wonder what they’ll do with Abner’s land?” Nick says.

“Rent it out,” Pete says. “Do you ever see them do the work themselves?” He hunches over, a big man, broad across the shoulders, bushy eyebrows, thick fingers gripped to his coffee cup. “They’re taking over the whole country, and they don’t pay taxes. The municipality will be out whatever Abner has been paying for property tax. Then who’s going to build the roads?”

“I should have been a lawyer,” Jeepers says. “They make all the money.”

“More coffee?” Tung Yee says. She fills Mac’s cup. “Out to your Indian place this morning?”

“Going this afternoon,” Mac says.

“Anyone else want fill?”

The front door opens and Abner shuffles in with a stranger, a short man, rather heavy-set, and with a well-scrubbed look about him.

“Duncan’s last breathing socialist,” Nick whispers. “And another one with him.”

The men at the table don’t change their postures, other than to straighten up just a little. They don’t gawk or change their expressions. Their faces don’t show any hint of a softening up, nor of a hardening, though their necks might have stiffened just a little at the sight of Abner. It’s not something new that they’re seeing. Abner has escorted socialist candidates during elections for the last half century.

“I’m John Popoff,” the candidate says. “Running for the NDP.” He circles the table, stops in front of Nick and holds out his hand. “John Popoff.”

Nick backs away from the table and stands up.

“Nick Belak. Pleased to meet you. I don’t need to shake Abner’s hand. It shakes enough already.”

“John farms at Fiske,” Abner says, with both his hands clutched to the back of an empty chair. He is bothered with Parkinson’s disease, and it really shows when he’s nervous.

Sid stands up and introduces himself, one politician to another, though he’d likely be a lot more at ease with the other candidate. Jeepers wipes his hands with a napkin and rises to his feet. No one’s at all certain where his vote lies, though Mac suspects that he might even be a closet socialist.

Pete remains seated.

“John has his diploma from the school of agriculture,” Abner says.

“Organic farmer?” Nick asks. “They’re teaching that at the university?”

“Not when the chemical companies fund the research,” Abner butts in. “What did Tommy Douglas say? ‘He who pays the piper call the tune?’”

As much as he is tolerated by his coffee-row cohorts, even loved because of their lifelong friendships, his politics is something else. They mark Abner in the camp of organic, NDP, anti-nuke, pro- choice, supporter of gun-registration, vegetarianism, gay marriage, communism, and to some extent anything that reeks of anything government, anything beyond the municipal level, seeing that the Sask Party has been careful to choose its candidates from the rural culture.

Pete looks at his watch. “Almost noon,” he says. “The wife will have soup on.”

“Yeah, and I should be going,” Jeepers says. “Pleased to meet you, Johnny.” Sid follows them out.

“Enough coffee for me,” Nick tells Tung Yee, and he covers his cup with his hand. Abner holds his cup out, and his hand shakes. “A cup for Johnny, too,” he says, his head shaking with a bounce not in rhythm with his coffee cup.

“Abner taking you around this afternoon?” Mac asks Johnny.

“No, I’m heading back to Fiske. Spending the afternoon in Bad Hills.”

“Jen’s making him lunch,” Abner says.

“After lunch, do you want to drive out to Bone Coulee with me, Abner?”

“I could.”

“Gotta find the right spot for the cairn, so I can tell the stonemason. It has to be finished in time for the fair.”

“You go to that Indian place?” Tung Yee asks.

“Why do you keep saying that? ‘Indian place’?”

“Place for bones. Indian tents. Wagon ruts.” She picks up the coffee can and shakes it. “Place for your tower.”

“I suppose it is an Indian place,” Mac says. With the NDP candidate sitting across the table, Mac wonders if he has heard any gossip about what happened in Duncan fifty-seven years ago. He’s no doubt after the Indian vote and would likely want to see Bone Coulee declared a heritage site. That might not even be a bad idea if it would lighten Mac’s guilt.

What happened still tugs at him like a rope around his neck. Who even cared about Indians back then? They certainly wouldn’t have been hiring an Indian to teach art courses in Bad Hills. Back then it was a time of growth on the family farms. Farmyards were filled with young families crowding the one-room country schools. Now there’s talk of closing the school in Duncan because there are no kids. Duncan still has a fair, but it’s in the fall. It’s not the big baseball tournament, harness racing, Casey Shows midway on the fourth Saturday in June, like it was in 1950, a date that Mac would rather forget.

After lunch, Abner joins Mac on the drive out to Bone Coulee. Mac appreciates the company, though it’s not a matter of a favour either way. They have kind of grown on each other over time. They know what to expect from one another. Each thinks in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way that the other is a fool, which somehow seems to strengthen the bond between them.

“Ever see so many geese? Abner says. The fields are covered with snows and Canadas; thousands and thousands of geese. “It used to be ducks when we were young, and now it’s geese. What makes the change?”

Mac wonders whether the same can be said for farming. The land’s the same land. Same air, same sun, same water, but the farming’s not the same. It’s getting so big that it doesn’t seem natural. Just as all these geese don’t seem natural.

Sitting upright and slightly forward on the seat, with the bounce of Mac’s truck on the washboard road, Abner takes on the appearance of a goose. He’s got a long and skinny neck, and his head twitches. All Mac has to do is praise the Sask Party, and Abner could flap and hiss and spit, and you’d swear he was a goose. He sits up straighter yet when they come by his farm.

“Look at that!” A cow moose and its calf nibble on the overgrown lilac bushes that line the driveway leading into the old Holt farmyard. Mac turns in and shuts off the motor. The cow moose glances their way, nips off another lilac branch, then ambles further up the lane with her calf.

“I should have my twenty-two,” Mac says.

“You wouldn’t shoot them, would you?”

“Not with a twenty-two, and not without a licence. But there are gophers out at the old place. More than ever, now that you can’t use strychnine. Remember back in school when we used to get two cents a tail?”

“Did you register the rifle?”

“The twenty-two? Just one more money grab.”

“Don’t know if anyone’s ever been charged anyway,” Abner says.

Another mile and they are parked at the top of the buffalo jump. They can see across the coulee to the remains of the Chorniak homestead…poplar trees growing out of the cellar hole, pieces of the barn foundation, the chicken coop with its caved-in roof. They can see the outline of the trail leading from the floor of the coulee, up past the homestead and up the rest of the way out of the coulee.

“The cairn should be over on that side,” Mac says. “Up from the old place.”

“Trail goes south, too,” Abner says. “Down around by the stink lake.”

“But I think my grandfather used the west trail to haul out the bones. Our way out of the coulee was to use the west trail. Isn’t this some view from up here? Just look, Abner!”

From the top of the buffalo jump they can see to Duncan and beyond. The land slopes in a broad and gentle plain where thousands of buffalo would have grazed, before millions of bushels of wheat were grown, with many more millions yet to come. Duncan’s most lucrative business enterprise is a chemical and fertilizer depot designed for just that purpose. Only one grain elevator remains at the siding where once there were six. But more grain than ever is produced, and it’s hauled out by truck.

Mac and Abner gaze back down into the coulee. Its soil is untouched. At Mohyla, where he stayed as a university student, Mac partook in Bible study on Wednesday nights. The one story he remembers most is that of Cain and Abel. It seemed to tie in so well to his studies in agriculture and the use of the land. Graze animals, or grow grain.
Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

“Look that way, Abner. To the south. Along the coulee hillsides. Look real hard, and you can make out a woman’s body. She’s reclining on her back.”

“Getting to be a poet, are you, Mac?”

“Had he seen this, Taras Shevchenko would have written a poem.”

“Countryman of yours, this Taras?” Abner is the only male friend that Mac would ever engage in this type of conversation. They tolerate each other’s foolishness.

“A great poet, and a son of the soil. See the salt lifting off the alkali ground? Where the coulee empties into the stink lake?”

“It is a rugged beauty,” Abner says, stretching his neck out as if he’s trying to find that woman lying on her back. “Indian place.”

“What did you say?”

“What Tung Yee said this morning: Indian place. I used to hire the Indians to pick rocks.”

“My father did too.”

“You didn’t.”

For a moment they look at each other and say nothing. Abner’s head twitches, and finally Mac turns away.

“No,” he says. “They’d come work for Dad, but when he’d pay them, they wouldn’t show up the next day.”

Abner shoots his goose look straight down the incline of the buffalo jump. Sunlight flashes on metal.

“Something down there,” he says. “In the trees. I think there are some people down there, but I can’t make them out for the trees.”

“I’ll get my binoculars from the truck,” Mac says.

He adjusts the focus, then aims down to the grove of trees just off to the right at the bottom of the buffalo jump.

“Panel truck and two women. Have a look.” Abner takes the binoculars, but his hands shake and he can’t focus.

“Here. Tell me what you see.” He hands the binoculars back to Mac.

“One’s got a walker.”

“Them? Your new neighbours?”

“I think so. Now one’s helping the other into the truck.”

The panel truck backs up and turns around, then follows the trail up past the cellar hole and out of the coulee. Mac and Abner can cut them off on the north grid where the panel truck will have to come across the coulee.

Mac stands out on the road, flagging with his hands. The panel truck stops, and Angela rolls down her window.

“Were you looking for something down there?” Mac asks.

“Tell him to go to hell,” Roseanna says, as she fiddles with a plastic tube attached to her nose.

“We have permission,” Angela says.

“Who from?” Mac says.

“Darlene Chorniak. She’s in my class. I teach art at the college in Bad Hills.”

“My daughter-in-law,” Mac says. He notices the back of the panel filled with willow saplings. “And it’s my property, not hers to do what she wants with.”

“You are a Chorniak?” Angela looks over to her mother, and then she smiles at Mac. “
The
Chorniak?”

“What are you going to do with all the willow?”

“They’re going to make baskets,” Abner shouts from the truck. “Jen told me.”

“Your friend seems to know,” Angela says.

“Take all you want,” Abner says. “Mac doesn’t mind. You don’t mind, do you, Mac?”

“The polite thing would have been for you to ask me first,” Mac says. “Next time, please ask.”

“Tell him to go to hell,” Roseanna says again. But Angela just smiles.

“Yes, next time. And then we could talk, Mr. Chorniak. I know of some matters we could talk about.”

Mac isn’t sure, but he thinks she winked at him when she said this. She then puts her truck in gear, sticks out her tongue and drives away.

•
Chapter 4
•

M
ac adjusts his binoculars. From his kitchen
window he watches the young Indian woman feed her dog. She reminds him of the Indian girl of fifty-seven years ago, but the pretty ones all look the same, just like the fat ones all look the same. She and her mother moved in some time last week, and they are the same ones that he and Abner saw out at the coulee.