Bone Dance (3 page)

“Wasn't done in by badgers,” Pop said, staring hard through his grease-speckled glasses. “Stone war mallet, probably.”

He sat on an old stool in the shed, cleaning motor parts, wiping them down with a rag, his big bony hands covered with black grease.

“You told me a great chief was buried there, Pop,” said Lonny, feeling cheated.

“Probably more than one person buried up there. We'll never know for sure.” Pop looked straight into Lonny's eyes. “We have to leave them be, son.”

A westerly breeze blew through the open door and windows, and Lonny's mom appeared, leaning against the doorway. “What's up?” Her cool slim fingers reached to tuck his hair behind his ears.

“Look what we found!” Robert turned proudly
with their prize still cupped in his hands. Her eyes widened.

“We found it on Medicine Bluff,” Lonny told her. “A badger dug it up.”

“Bury it,” she said, turning away. “Go back there, and bury it.”

“Can't we keep it awhile?” Lonny pleaded.

Pop bent again over his work. “Do what your mother says. Even badgers have no business disturbing the dead.”

“He was just being a badger.” Lonny pouted.

“Spade's over there in the corner,” said Pop.

So he and Robert took the spade and the skull, reluctantly got on their bikes, and wheeled back to Medicine Bluff.

“Stupid badger,” said Lonny, pressing his foot on the blade, digging deep into the rich dark heart of the hill. The smell of sage and bergamot rose up from the loamy upturned soil. The badger was either not at home or had moved somewhere else. Lonny kept on digging.

Robert stood beside him, arms folded. “Are you going to just keep doing that? How much more are you going to dig?”

“Shut up,” said Lonny. “Don't ask dumb questions.”

“I want to dig, too. I want to find out what's in there.”

“Then take the damn shovel. Here.”

They took turns digging. They unearthed what might have been the remains of a child: a leg bone, a
small rib, a tiny skeletal hand. By then, neither of them was brave enough to stop. Only a couple of feet beneath the surface of the mound, they began to unearth a complete skeleton, a big one. It was buried in a crouching position. They dug with the shovel. They dug with their hands. They found a shell necklace, a portion of a clay pot, a perfect pale arrowhead mixed in with the bones of the skeleton's ribs. They dug with a queer and giddy energy until Lonny shot up from the mound and sat on the edge of it, grabbing mouthfuls of air.

He prayed for the sun to vaporize the feelings that were creeping in around him. Down the hill the poplar leaves shook like tongues in the wind.

Robert came up from the mound, too, gasping. His freckles stood out like startled dots against his white skin. “I feel sick,” he said, weaving back down one side of the hill.

When Robert returned, Lonny quickly swiped tears from his eyes with the backs of his hands.

“I didn't think it'd be like this,” Robert said.

“Liar,” said Lonny. “What'd you think we'd find— a couple of arrowheads?”

“Why didn't you stop?”

“Why didn't
you
stop?”

They put everything back as best they could. They even patted back the clumps of prairie grass and flowers, the blazing star, the bergamot, the scented sage, so that all would appear as normal as possible. Then they got on their bikes and rode off the property.
Behind them the bruised spirits rose and shook themselves from a long uneasy sleep.

Two nights later his mother died. She just crumpled in front of his stepfather at a dance. He hadn't been there to see it but could still play it over in his imagination: his mother sauntering up, smiling with all of her heart in her eyes. His stepfather reaching out to hold her in his awkward but tender way, and then his own smile suddenly dying as she slipped down his body to the dance floor.

In rational waking moments, he understood that it was her weak heart that killed her, a birth defect no one before had detected. But swimming breathless just below the surface was the voice he couldn't shake, the one telling him that her death and their bad luck and the unearthing of those ancient skeletons were all entwined.

Earl McKay sat at the kitchen table with Pop. It was the first Sunday in January, and Earl hadn't drawn a sober breath since just before Christmas. He'd staggered on snowshoes through a blizzard and pulled a hip flask from his jacket pocket. He proceeded to add “a little juice” to two stained coffee mugs. His hand shook as he poured the whiskey.

Lonny turned away. He took off his glasses and tossed them on top of the refrigerator. He went to the kitchen sink, where he loudly ran the tap and vigorously scraped caked-on eggs and crud off a black frying pan.

“I just wrote a letter to my daughter,” said Earl. “It was her birthday a couple of weeks back. Time for a little celebration.”

Even with his back to Earl, Lonny could hear the pleading tone of a weak man. A man who was the total opposite of Pop LaFrenière.

Pop was polite. Sometimes his politeness to people who didn't deserve it drove Lonny crazy. He watched
him get up from the table, go over to the stove, come back with the fresh pot of coffee.

“I didn't know you had a daughter, Earl,” he said, pouring coffee into their whiskey.

“She's just turned seventeen years old, and that's about how long it's been since I've seen her.”

Lucky for her, thought Lonny. He ran hot sudsy water into the sink.

“Well, well,” said Pop sympathetically. “That is too bad. Children are a comfort.” After a long pause, he added, “I don't know what I would have done after my Margaret died if it hadn't been for Lonny here.”

Behind the clattering of dishes, the two men fell silent. Lonny felt an old pain rise in his heart. For Pop. For himself. For the woman they had both loved. Here he was, almost eighteen years old, and still, even in his waking life, the damn tears could come. They rolled from his eyes and fell through soap clouds into the dishwater.

When he was very small, before Pop, there had just been the two of them. Mom and him. Now there was just two again. Pop and him. Funny how life works out.

He often had memories about the small apartment back in Winnipeg. Now he realized that his mother hadn't been much more than a teenager. She chainsmoked back then. He remembered her thick silky hair pulled into a high ponytail. Standing on her lap, in his bare feet, the smoke from her cigarette curling up from the ashtray behind them, he'd put his hands on her cheeks, smoothing them, smoothing her hair,
then reach his arms around and hug her. He could clearly remember her smell. She always smelled of cigarettes. Cigarettes and shampoo. And she always hugged him back, fiercely.

He also remembered the first time he saw Pop. He stood like a large bear in the doorway of their apartment. Then he took them out to McDonald's. He bought Lonny those little cookies. Two boxes. One for now. The other for later.

His mother had answered a personal ad in the newspaper.
Widowed farmer, no children, looking for companionship. Possible relationship. Children welcome
. The rest, as they say, was history.

Before Earl left, he pulled the letter to his daughter out of his pocket and placed it with drunken grace on the table. “Going back up to my little place now. Don't worry about me. Storm's subsided from the look of it. But would one of you mind dropping this off in the mail when you're in town?”

“Lonny will be glad to do it,” offered Pop. “You'll do that for Earl, won't you, son.”

“Yes,” he said, noting that it didn't have a stamp. He would have to make a special trip from the high school to the post office downtown. On his lunch break. Most of which would be taken up with jazz band practice. Playing the four-hundred-dollar guitar that had been his extraordinary seventeenth-birthday present from his perpetually broke stepfather. Never mind, he'd buy the goddamn stamp.

“I'd be grateful,” said Earl, looking up at him with watery weary eyes.

Earl went out the door, tied on his snowshoes, and, whistling tunelessly, staggered off into the snowy hills again.

On Monday, Lonny meant to mail the letter, but band practice went overtime. And Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday he went right from school to his job, at Petro-Can. Friday, Pop came around to the school at lunchtime to say that Earl had caught a really bad virus, and he'd just had to admit him to the Valley View Health Centre. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, Earl continued to get worse. Tuesday, something went wrong with his heart. Wednesday, he developed pneumonia, and then things truly went from bad to worse. The following Monday he died.

Lonny still had the letter in the inside pocket of his jacket. He pulled it out frequently to look at it. He liked her name: Alexandra Marie Sinclair. He liked the way it sounded. What could Earl possibly find to say to a daughter he'd never taken care of, never even met? He couldn't send it now. But he couldn't just throw it away either. Finally, he put Earl McKay's last letter to his daughter into the drawer beside his bed. And that was that.

When Alex's Cree grandfather was a young man, he came back, disillusioned, fearful, and a little bit crazy, from World War II. “My reaction to that,” he told her once, “was to go
way
far up north. Lose myself in the bush. Had a trapline there. Trapped mostly white arctic fox, some beaver, the occasional lynx. That first winter I remember months and months of snow that cleaned out my spirit. I remember drinking tea made from boiled snow water. And smoking kinnikinnik with a man who told me to pay close attention to my dreams. They would tell me things, he said, that would be important to my life. So then I stayed up north. I stayed for nineteen years. I was a lonely man back in that time. Sad in my heart. And then, finally, my dreams led me to your grandmother.”

The night before the letter arrived, the stranger's letter, she had a vivid, confusing dream.

Down a hill, by a lake, she watches Grandpa fishing. Talking to himself, his voice rising and falling, a soft drone. He casts off a perfect line that catches the sun
and wind in midair, like spider silk. She follows the line over the lake. She tumbles with it as the air cools, then suddenly freezes into winter. And then she is tracking her father through the sloping light of January. He wears Grandpa's old bear-paw showshoes that move swiftly over the crusted snow. She wades through the tracks because her bare feet will not hold her on the surface. The snow sings around her: Vanished, vanished, vanished.

She woke up suddenly, feeling empty and cold, and turned her face on her pillow to look at the glowing frost patterns on the window. What had she been dreaming? Yes, she remembered! She saw Grandpa clearly, just as if it were only yesterday and not one entire long year since he had died and disappeared from this planet.

Strangely, too, there was her father. And why would he be there? But then it wasn't exactly a dream about him. It was a dream about his absence.

All the letters he had ever sent to her, half a dozen, nested like hollow eggs in a small brown box on her window ledge. Addressed in his faded scrawling handwriting to Miss Alexandra Marie Sinclair. Through the years each letter had scratched at the faint tracings of his life. The pale postal stamp on the first letter said
Calgary, Alberta.

She's six years old. Her mother leans against the doorway of the kitchen in a long white bathrobe and watches her open the letter. That night she can't sleep
,
she is so excited. In the morning, her mother makes her put it away. In its proper place. But she keeps stealing it out to look at it.

And the next letter? No return address again. But the postmaster's stamp read
Indian Head, Saskatchewan.

No, you can't write back to him. How would he get it? He's probably moved on anyway.

Dear Daddy, I can't send this letter. But I'm writing to you anyway. It's wintertime. Are you cold? Why don't you come and see me? You could stay at Grandpa's house. He has an extra bedroom. Your loving daughter, Alexandra Marie Sinclair.

Letter number three came from Medicine Hat.

Dear Alexandra Marie, How are you? I am fine and working at a ranch. Have a happy 10th birthday. Sincerely, Earl McKay.

Dear Father, I know you won't get this letter. But I'm sending it anyway. Why don't you ever ever ever come and visit me? Are you mad at me? I'm mad at you. Please send me another letter or I will never speak to you ever again. Your daughter, in case you have forgotten, Alexandra Marie McKay-Sinclair.

In the fourth letter he had moved on to Lethbridge. Moving. Always moving.

She's sitting in a restaurant with Mom and Auntie Francine. Her aunt is going on about how that “nomad” was thirteen years older than her mother—unlucky thirteen—and about how he was always full of schemes and big ideas. And her mother, clinking perfect unpolished nails against a water glass, tells Francine, “Well, I loved him. Once.”

An old argument. As old as his letters to her. In his fifth letter he was back here, in Manitoba.

Dear Alexandra, I'm here in the Lacs des Placottes Valley. Staying for a while. It's a beautiful day. I like it here. Say hello to your mother if she cares for me to remember her. I hope you have a good summer. Take time, as they say, to smell the roses. Wild ones, I figure, are the best. Take care, my girl. And always look the world straight in the eye. Sincerely, Earl McKay.

Dear Dad, I am…
Dear Dad, How are…?
Dear Dad, I don't know what to say to you.…

And in his sixth and final letter, he'd gone back to Lethbridge.

Her mom brought in the morning mail. She was spending longer than usual in the hallway. In the kitchen, Alex and Auntie Francine were playing cards. Francine shook with laughter, so pleased with herself for putting down two one-eyed jacks.