Bone Dance (2 page)

Since then, things had been gradually improving. Pop had sold everything but the homestead and another small piece of land: five acres of hills and woodlands and pasture where they still lived in the bright yellow bungalow. He'd found work at the Beaver Lumber store in town. In a few short months, he'd worked himself up to assistant manager, and he went about this job with a quiet dignity even though his heart wasn't in it. His heart was still on the land, and Lonny knew it probably always would be.

Lonny also had found work. Part-time at a gas station that didn't mind that his hair curved down past his shoulders. Mr. Johnson, his boss, had told Pop, “That big boy of yours is real personable. A charmer, just like his mother was. Everybody likes Lonny.”

Everybody except those damn spirits. At least, since he was twelve years old, they'd stopped coming into his bedroom at night.

Robert Lang, his oldest friend in the world, poked his head in the truck window, leaned on one arm, nodded his head after the retreating Earl McKay, and said, “So who's the cowboy?”

“Buying up the homestead,” said Lonny, watching Earl's back disappear into the house. “He's gone inside with Pop.”

“And how's he taking it?” Robert pulled back, looked down at his feet, kicked lightly at the side of the truck.

“Not good.”

“You going into town later?”

“I don't know,” said Lonny. “Maybe. Why?”

“A party. Over at Sherry-Lynne Baker's place. I came all this way to tell you about it, stud,” he drawled.

“Yeah, all five miles.” Lonny grinned at goofy Robert.

“So,” said Robert cheerfully, “you gonna join us? Or you gonna stay home and baby-sit your pop?”

“Don't know,” said Lonny, resenting that last remark.

“Come on,” Robert urged. “What's he going to do once you move out? Things'll just keep goin' on the same old way as they have since your ma died. Whether you're there or not. Nothing you can do to change that. Am I right?”

“That's not the point. He shouldn't be alone tonight.”

“Suit yourself.” Robert drummed a happy little beat on the truck door. “Don't drag your ass out on my account.”

“I'll think about it, man.” Lonny flopped his head back on the seat and wondered how much more of this he could take. I owe that man in there my life, he thought, and all I ever seem to do is watch him suffer again and again. What a pathetic world.

Robert, reaching in, lightly punched Lonny's shoulder. “It isn't your fault that he's selling. Cut yourself a little slack there, buddy. It's his decision, right?” And then he left.

His decision. A savings account earmarked for other things, special things, Pop said. What special things? Well, for your life. Imagine, you could be the first LaFrenière to get a real education.

God knows he didn't want the homestead, and Pop understood this. He didn't have to say a single word. The property, and all that it had meant to over one hundred years of LaFrenières, was itself a ghost. It hovered between them, anxious, alert to the currents of human emotion.

Well, maybe now, Lonny thought, he'll start to forget. And then, God help me, I can, too.

But it wasn't going to be easy. Several hours later Pop stood in the kitchen like a man lost in his own house. And then, when Lonny couldn't think of what else to do, he asked if he could get him anything.

“No, no.” Pop shook his head, slowly leaned over. Picked up a button that, hanging by a thread, had finally toppled off his sweater onto the floor. Turned it over thoughtfully. Looked at it. Put it in his pocket. He wiped his hand over his face, looked up at the moon that had risen outside the kitchen window. “It's been a long day,” he said.

Lonny thought about another day. The deep blue sky of autumn. The truck ride, with his new stepfather, onto the property. Mr. LaFrenière smiled his big gap-toothed smile, took his cap, put it on Lonny.

He was small back then, even for seven. When they got out of the truck, Pop called him a sack of potatoes. He picked him up and threw him over his shoulder and carried him, yelling for the cap that had just flown off. Lonny laughed, upside down. The ground was the sky and the sky, the ground.

“And now, I'm going to show you the prettiest sight in all of Manitoba,” Pop said, sliding Lonny down off his back.

Lonny rushed back to get the cap, then roared after him, through the bushes, pumping his small sturdy legs to keep up with Pop, who was climbing up Medicine Bluff just like he had no legs at all. Like he had wings for feet.

At the top, both of them out of breath, Pop sat down, pulling Lonny beside him. He reached to smooth a silvery green plant with his hand. “Smell,” he said, and Lonny bent over and inhaled for the first time the pungent medicinal smell of prairie sage.

A September sun shone fully on the straw-colored grasses. A flock of pelicans flew over the lake below, gliding like thunderheads just above the surface of the water.

But what Lonny remembered noticing most of all was the silence. And the peaceful feeling that grew right up inside him. This big prairie country was filled for miles around with the sounds of wind and crickets. A car crawled silently along the yellow gravel road at the other side of the valley.

“This, that we are sitting on,” Pop had said, indicating the slight contour that rose a couple of feet above the natural top of the hill. “This is an Indian burial mound. It has the distinction of being one of the few left in this province that hasn't been dug up and inspected by grave robbers.”

“Robbers?”

“My grandfather—and that would be your greatgrandfather by association, since you have now become a LaFrenière—he broke his back buffalo hunting. Can you imagine a time that long ago?”

“Did he get better?”

“Oh, yes. But this land that you see all around, it was here before him. It was here before the earliest people. And most certainly it was here before the French and the English.
And
the Métis,” he said, indicating
his own heart. “It's old, Lonny. Old as time. So that's why we have to take care of it. It's our job. Our responsibility.” He paused, patted the mound. “Here rest the bones of an ancient person.”

“Here? Right here?”

“That's right.”

“How do you know he's ancient?” Lonny liked the sound of the word.

“Because those first people, they buried their most revered in the highest places. Right beneath us rest the bones of a medicine man. Or maybe a great chief! Or my name isn't Thomas LaFrenière.” He paused dramatically. Lonny leaned against him and looked up into his face.

Pop chuckled, reached down, and tugged the cap brim over Lonny's eyes. “Let's go home now,” he said, “and see that mother of yours. If we stay away too long, we might make her mad at us men.”

“So, my babe,” she said when he and Pop scuffed up the porch steps, knocking mud off their boots, “how was that? Did you like it? Come here.” She pulled him onto her lap, tickling his ear.

“It was like that time I saw the light on the trees!” he told her excitedly. “That's
just
how it felt!”

One day, back in the city, she'd told him that if you settled down and were very quiet, you could see light come right out and dance on the branches after the long, hard winter. “Mmm-hmm, really, I wouldn't lie to you. See that tree, now?” She pointed out past the little south-facing window of their tiny apartment. “Sit down and stare real hard at it.”

He sat down on the floor with his hands in his lap, just like they did on
Sesame Street,
and then he stared hard at the tree. His eyes made big tears from concentration, and just when he was ready to give up, she said, “Keep looking,” from the sofa where she sat folding socks and little shirts. He kept looking, to please her. And then the bare limbs of that spring tree
did
begin to shimmer with dancing light! With points and beads and ripples of pale gold that slowly bleached out and filled his eyes.

A year after she married Pop, his mom, glowing and big and beautiful, went into the hospital to give birth to his baby sister. She came home empty-armed and sad. The light went out around her. He was eight years old and had never before been to a funeral.

He crept into Pop's arms. It was a cold spring day. “It's okay, it's okay,” Pop said over and over again. “We'll be all right. Things will be okay again.”

And, after a while, they were. Wild, blond ex-hippie Deena came into their yard. She appeared, a month later, in June, on a chestnut red horse. She slipped off the animal's back, extended her tanned hand to Lonny's mom, and said, “I'm Deena. I live down the road. It's time we met.”

“Deena.” Pop, coming up from the barn, looked at her in stunned surprise. “Thought you ran off to Calgary.”

She flushed, and Lonny thought she was beautiful. “Been back over a month,” she said. “Couldn't stay in the city a minute longer. Got restless again. Discovered
I couldn't breathe. So I guess this is going to be my home after all.”

“That's good,” said Pop, and a little current, like the flutter of invisible wings, flew between them, then vanished.

A big freckly grin now covered Deena's face. “Didn't you hear? My uncle died and left me a pile of money. I just bought the old café in town. And who might you be?” She tucked her strong, lemony, horsey-smelling fingers under Lonny's chin. Then she turned her eyes back to Lonny's mom. “I don't suppose there's a person in this community who hasn't heard about your loss. I hear a good eighty percent turned up for the funeral. That's some outpouring of love. But I sure am sorry for what you must be going through.” Her boots were the same shiny color as her horse, who now arched its neck and nudged her shoulder.

Lonny's mom turned her face away. He and Pop stood looking at her, caught in their desperate hope for some happy response. In that instant he knew two things: that they both loved her beyond measure, and that their lives were spun together out of the silk of her very breath.

She turned back and, reaching out, took Deena's hand. She urged her shyly toward the house. “Come inside,” she said. “I'll make us some tea.”

His mom changed after that. She seemed a different person. She was more demanding, less willing to stick around the farm and just be with Lonny and Pop. But she wasn't crying anymore, and that was a big plus.

“Deena's coming over,” she'd say. “We're all going into town now. She's wallpapering her restaurant today. Tom, where's that paste you've been holding on to? We don't need it anymore.”

And at the grand opening of Deena's Deli, Deena made a big speech about finding friends in places where you'd hardly expect they'd be.

That night, the night of the opening, Lonny overheard Pop say softly to his mom, “Deena and I had a little something going. That was a long time ago. Before you came along and stole my heart.”

His mom, in the shocking quiet of their kitchen, said, “I knew that.”

“You knew? She told you?”

“She didn't have to. It took courage for her to come and be my friend.”

And so, life went on like that for quite a while. A little sister never got to be part of their family. The plans that had been made around her arrival—the freshly painted wicker bassinet that had held generations of LaFrenière babies, the little blue room off Mom and Pop's bedroom, the talk of a family of four—were replaced by Deena, what she was doing, what she thought about this and that. She was included in family horseback rides in the summer and skating at the rink in town in the winter. And as Lonny grew and took the rural bus to school and started making friends of his own, he didn't think too much more about that heightened time, about the strange and sad and brave world of grown-ups.

A week after Earl McKay moved onto the old LaFrenière land, Lonny woke up in his room, his chest heaving with tears. His sobs were so awful and uncontrollable, he was afraid he would wake up Pop.

He had been dreaming of his mother. She had appeared to him as a vision in a shiny white dress decorated with beads the color of the sunrise and long, soft feathery fringe. She had never worn such a dress when she was alive. She came and sat on his bed, crossed her legs, thoughtfully jigged one foot up and down. “Lonny, my babe,” she said at last in a sad and disappointed voice, “how come you did that? It's a sacred place.”

He wanted her to tell him that she loved him, to turn and to cling to her, to keep her close inside his heart. But she just put her hands on her knees and shook her head. “You were supposed to take care of it, not dig it up. Why couldn't you leave those poor souls in peace?” And then she got up and left through his bedroom door.

Robert Lang was the only person who shared his guilty secret. And it had all started so innocently. A badger kicked something out of its den on Medicine Bluff.

It was the year he turned eleven. He and Robert, a couple of raunchy kids, had gone up there, their packs full of sandwiches and cookies and soft drinks and some contraband magazines belonging to Robert's older brother, Danny. It was a sizzling hot July afternoon,
and Medicine Bluff was their favorite place to be.

Near the top of the slope they saw something bony lying just outside the opening of the badger's den. Lonny reached down and rolled it over. Faceup. It was a small human skull. Its toothless jaws, its round vacant eyes, stared up at him. This was not the skull of a great chief or medicine man. It was not much bigger than his hand. So much for Pop's theory. He turned to say something to Robert, and he was gone, already at the bottom of the hill and still running. But twenty minutes later, back at home, Robert took the tiny skull out of Lonny's hands.

“Look!” he said, rolling it over to show Pop how the base of the skull had been crushed.