Luna (7 page)

A little of both, I guess, she told herself.

She had reached the hills on the far side of the slough and she started up one of the highest ones, zigzagging her horse and holding onto her saddle blanket just ahead of the saddle horn so that it wouldn’t work its way out behind the saddle and fall off. At the top of the hill, holding onto her hat against the wind, she paused and looked out over the lease. Far off to the east, low on the horizon, the blue of the sky had turned to a brownish haze. The blowing dust even hid the elevators ten miles away at Mallard. She lowered her eyes to the field below where she sat and scanned the grazing cattle, counting them, searching the field for strays off by themselves. She counted the calves, too, and then spotted a lone cow far off to the east. Hurriedly she descended the hill. Near the bottom she urged her horse to a lope, then eased off after a minute to a trot, and headed in the direction of the solitary cow.

Passing through a draw she skirted a patch of cinquefoil blooming yellow against the grey-green grass, and for no reason, thought of Rhea. At the opening of a shallow, sloping coulee, she stopped, then began the descent, following a cowpath that wandered among the wild rosebushes, past low, stunted saskatoons and greasewood. Little patches of antelope droppings were scattered along the path. She climbed the other side and rounded a patch of vetches not yet opened to the light.

She saw that look in Diane’s eyes again. It made her shiver just to think of it. It reminded her of the look she had seen in her mother’s eyes in those last days before she died. She knew that none of the things she had said to Diane had made any difference to her, and she was sorry now that she had been so harsh. But she had thought Diane needed to hear those things. She had thought she could convince her that she was being foolish. But now, alone, she had to admit to herself that she really didn’t understand what it was that Diane wanted, or what was going on in her mind. All I ever wanted was to be a wife and mother, Selena thought. No nursing for me, like my mother wanted. She thought about the first time Kent made love to her that weekend in the fall of their grade twelve year. A bunch of them had gone to a dance at Antelope, and then gone from there to another dance they had heard about in the park. Her mother had been furious with her because she didn’t get home till five in the morning. She remembered how she had
endured the questioning, the accusations, the punishment, without really noticing. What could her mother say that would matter after what had happened last night? From that moment when he entered her, Selena realized, the world never looked the same again. And then they had married.

A long-eared jackrabbit burst out of a clump of sage and bounded away with long, lazy steps. She lifted her head to watch him go, then noticed that while she had been daydreaming, she had ridden up on the cow. I might have ridden right past her, she thought, disgusted with herself and glad that Kent wasn’t there to see it.

She stopped her horse and turned in the saddle to search the clumps of sage and the rocks for a lost calf curled up beside them, but there was none to be seen. Checking the cow again, she saw that her bag was uncomfortably full. Good. This must be the cow that belonged to the lost calf. She settled down in her saddle and nudged her horse to a trot. It was getting late, six at least, judging by the sun. She began to chase the cow back in the direction she had come from, concentrating hard on what she was doing now, anxious not to lose the cow, and thinking of what Kent would say if she did.

But the cow was willing to go and offered little resistance. In fifteen minutes they were back at the waterhole. As she neared it, Selena saw Kent on the far side, his rope unfurled and dangling, using it to persuade, with gentle touches, the lost calf to go around the waterhole toward Selena and the cow she had brought with her.

The calf began to bleat again and the cow lifted her head, bellowed an anxious reply and began to run toward the calf. When they met each other, Selena and Kent on opposite sides of them, watching, the cow smelled the calf all over and, satisfied that it was her own, stood to let it nurse, which it did eagerly and fiercely, butting her firmly with its head as it searched for a teat.

They watched for a moment. Then Kent called to her, “You start back with the sick cow. It’s going to be awful slow going. I’ll do the rest of the checking myself.”

“Okay,” she called back, ready to say something more, but he had already turned his horse and was heading west, riding fast. She turned too,
then, found the sick cow over the next hill, and started back to the corrals two miles to the south, with the cow stumbling slowly ahead of her.

The wind at last had died away, and all the delicate prairie noises were clear in the stillness: the quack of a couple of ducks half a mile away at the waterhole, the musical chatter of the larks, and the sound of her own horse’s feet swishing through the grass. Even the laboured breathing of the sick cow ahead of her was loud in the evening hush, and Selena rode slowly, not to make the cow’s suffering worse. Kent or any of the other men, busy and harassed with their interminable work and financial worries, would have pushed the cow much harder, but there was enough daylight left, and Selena had no other job pressuring her, so she took her time.

“You have to go home, girl,” she said to the cow. “We can’t look after you out here.” The cow lumbered on through the grass, its head down each step an effort, stopping every few feet. After a while they settled into a steady, slow walk, leaving a crooked path in the grass behind them.

They passed another duck’s nest, hidden in a patch of tall grass, she noticed it only because the duck flew up as they drew near and she caught a glimpse of a handful of beige eggs, barely visible in the nest. Coming around a hill they startled a few antelope, a buck and three does. The does disappeared at once over the hill but the buck stopped to watch Selena and the cow draw a little nearer before it, too, dashed away, its hooves not appearing to touch the ground as it ran. Selena and the cow plodded on and soon were out of the hills and onto the flat land that began a mile or so from the buildings. A few minutes later the house, barn and corrals appeared, specks against the grass.

When they were about a half mile from the yard, Selena dismounted and walked, leading her horse, behind the cow, which had slowed even more. In this way, at last, she brought the cow into the corral, penned her, and closed the gate.

She turned away then, still leading her horse, and stared out toward the west, the direction she had just come from. Darkness was falling, the last glow of red was fading from behind the hills, which had flattened and merged with the evening purple. She could no longer make out any
details, but she knew that somewhere out there, in those shadows, Kent was riding toward her.

Melancholy pierced her, the lateness of the hour, the sun gone down, the land disappearing all around her into the night shadows. Her horse drew near and nudged her shoulder, then brushed his soft nose to her cheek and hair. A shiver ran through her. The dark sky, the low, distant hills, the land itself were pressing into her, claiming her, and she felt as if there was nothing left of her own, her private soul.

To the west the coyotes began their nightly wailing. Her horse, hungry and thirsty, stopped its restless moving and lifted its head as its ears went up. She wanted her heart to close, she wanted the gaping hollow that had opened in her gut to suck in, she felt as though she might fall, weighted as she was with the world.

She led her horse into the barn, unsaddled him and turned him out into the corral. He went straight to the waterer and she went back to the barn and came out with an armload of hay from a broken bale and threw it over the fence to him.

The moon had risen. It hung low in the sky over her garden, eerie and white. She shut the barn door and crossed the corral. As she opened the gate, she could hear hoofbeats coming across the field and she knew that in a minute Kent would be there. She shut the gate and went toward the house, not waiting for him.

“They’re starting to come in,” Helen called over her shoulder from the doorway between the kitchen and the hall. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the hissing of the big pots on the two stoves, the clattering of dishes being washed in the sink, and the voices of the other women hurrying around the kitchen. Selena leaned past her to look down the hall. It was filled with rows of long tables covered with white paper tablecloths and set with cutlery, salt and pepper shakers and cream and sugar sets. Rena was
moving among the tables, setting small vases, each holding a pink and a blue artificial daisy and a sprig of artificial fern, two to a table. She was moving quickly, straightening the chairs and benches arranged on each side of the tables, while her daughter Tracey followed, carefully carrying the tray of vases, her expression serious, both of them intent on their work.

At the far end of the hall, by the main entrance, Selena saw Phoebe and Melissa sitting at the reception table. As she watched, Phoebe stood up, accepted a shining, silver-wrapped parcel from the couple who were bending to sign the guest book, and carried it to the table behind them, which was beginning to be piled with gifts. Selena smiled without meaning to, because Phoebe looked so pretty in her white cotton dress with the pink belt, her shoulder-length, light brown hair carefully brushed and shining. Then she scoffed at herself—an ordinary teenager, like all the rest of them here, she thought. Yes, but my own little girl. She threw the tea towel she was holding over her shoulder, then hastily took it off again: don’t put your tea towel over your shoulder, your hair will touch it, it’s a messy habit, her mother’s voice still echoing in her ears after all these years. Sometimes she thought she would never shake her mother’s teachings. It both angered her and pleased her to think that she was what her mother had made her.

Phoebe was seated again, laughing with Melissa about something, and more people were coming in, smiling and calling to each other. And Phoebe? she wondered, watching her, what have I made her? Phoebe was standing again, moving quickly, several parcels piled up in her arms. She tried to think of what she had taught her: don’t let the boys touch you, was the first admonition that sprang into her mind, seeing her now, so womanly and pretty. But no, earlier than that. She frowned, trying to remember. Wash your hands often, it’s important to be clean. Be neat, comb your hair whenever you think of it during the day. Don’t make a lot of noise, nobody likes a roughneck girl. Be polite … more admonitions came crowding into her mind.

No, she thought, as Phoebe returned to her chair. Surely those weren’t the things that would make a woman of Phoebe. It wasn’t that they weren’t important, it was just that something seemed to be missing. What was it that was missing? It seemed to her that there was some core to what
it meant to be a woman that she had never had the words to talk about. Was it God? Phoebe had asked her about God more than once over the years. Yes, there is a God, Selena had told her; ask the minister, ask your Sunday School teacher. Maybe she should have tried harder to answer Phoebe herself. But what answers do I have? she wondered.

“Excuse me,” Joanne sang in her ear. She had to turn sideways to squeeze through the door past Selena. She was carrying a dish of pickles in each hand and her cheeks were flushed with the heat in the kitchen, her eyes too bright. The ties of her apron barely met at the back.

“Let me take those,” Selena said, reaching for the thick glass dishes without waiting for Joanne to answer her. She took one in each hand, and nodded toward the only chair in the kitchen, pushed back into a corner in front of the cupboards. “You better go sit down.”

“I’m fine,” Joanne protested, not smiling.

“Do what she tells you,” Ruth called from behind them. “You’ll work hard enough once the baby comes.” Ruth was a cousin of Joanne’s so she could boss her around. Joanne went slowly to the chair and sat down, then began to fan herself with a paper napkin.

“If it weren’t so hot, it wouldn’t be so bad,” Enid remarked to Selena. “I’ll take those.” Before Selena could move, she had taken the two dishes of pickles from her and had hurried out into the hall with them. Selena made a little face at her back.

“These potatoes are ready,” Ruth said. Selena hurried to the stove. Together they lifted the steaming pot and drained the boiling water off into one of the sinks. Phyllis and Lola had begun cutting the pies and were setting the pieces onto rows of dessert plates. Phoebe came into the kitchen, asked Helen something, then went out again. Ruth and Selena set the big pot of potatoes onto a backless chair and began to take turns mashing them with a long-handled potato masher.

“It’s so hot,” Ruth said, “but you can’t open the blamed door for the flies and grasshoppers. Did Phoebe make her dress?”

“In Home Ec.” Ruth mashed vigorously for a moment, then lifted her head and straightened, panting, her face red, her temples glossy with sweat.

“Let ‘em have pretty dresses while they can,” she said. “Lord knows, it don’t last.” Selena thought of Ruth’s husband, Buck, and shuddered inwardly, thinking of Phoebe. At least Brian was a decent kid, drank only a little, if Phoebe could be believed, had no reputation for being hard on vehicles or mouthy with the older men. Didn’t touch drugs, Phoebe swore. Still, you never knew. Marry a man, then find out what you’ve gotten yourself into.

She took the masher from Ruth and bent, raising and lowering it, thrusting hard, holding it with both hands. It took all her strength to push it through the mound of potatoes.

“Okay, no more lumps,” she said. At the table in the centre of the kitchen Enid and Ella were mashing another big pot of potatoes. The milk and butter sat on the table beside them and Selena reached for them, poured in a quantity of milk, then cut of a piece of butter which she broke into smaller pieces and added to the potatoes which Ruth had already begun to whip, using the masher. Selena grasped the pot and held it steady for her.

“Look out everybody!” Lola had opened one of the oven doors and was pulling out a roaster, which she set on the oven door. She lifted off the lid and a cloud of steam and the smell of roasting beef swept through the sweltering room. Ruth’s husband, Buck, detached himself from a group of men he’d been standing with near the doorway and put his head into the kitchen.

“Give me a hand in here,” Lola called to him and he hurried in, took the oven mitts from her and lifted the roaster onto the table. Ruth lifted her head from the potatoes, and Selena saw her send a sharp glance toward her husband’s back, her lips tightening. Lola, after two children, still had her figure; she was still young and attractive. And there was Buck, grey-haired, gnarled, with a lined, reddish face from hard work and drink, being jovial and overly helpful.

“Does he do that at home, too?” Selena muttered to Ruth, half-grinning, and laughed at Ruth’s sarcastic “Hah!” Selena took the masher from her and began to whip while Ruth held the pot.

“Where’s Diane tonight?” Ruth asked. Her head bent, working hard to move the masher swiftly through the potatoes so they would cream
and whip up, Selena hardly had the breath to answer. She hadn’t even noticed that Diane wasn’t there to help. Diane had never been as faithful as many of the members. Some women were like that. Sally Macklin was another one, although sometimes Selena suspected she didn’t come too often because the women didn’t really accept her. She had always been a little bit different anyway, but when she started writing poetry and getting it published, it was worse, nobody knew how to talk to her. But Diane—maybe Kent was right, maybe Diane was just a little bit lazy.

“I think that’s enough,” she said, standing back, panting. “Diane must have gone to get Rhea.” She turned toward the second pot to help, but Ella was already working at it, talking to Enid as she mashed.

“For a pot this size, it takes about a pint, sometimes more, depends on the potatoes, what kind you use and how old they are and so on.”

“I’ve never cooked such a big potful,” Enid said, apologetically. She came from a town seventy-five miles down the road. They must do things differently there, Selena thought.

“You young ones’ll have to take over when us older ones give up,” Ella said, puffing as she whipped.

“I’ll do that,” Enid offered, and Selena had to smile at how the young ones always think they’re stronger than the ones who’ve been at it for years. Enid would play out long before Ella would, she thought.

Rhoda had begun to fill two big serving bowls with the creamy potatoes. Lola and Ruth were slicing the big roasts of beef and Phyllis was standing at the stove, sweating, and stirring the gravy. Selena stood back out of the way and looked around the busy, crowded kitchen in search of another job that needed doing. The commotion out in the hall was growing louder by the minute and people kept spilling into the kitchen, looking for a drink of water or a damp cloth to wipe a child’s face, or to gossip, or to offer help.

Selena thought of all the times since she was a girl, since she was Phoebe’s age, she had come into this kitchen carrying a salad, or three dozen buns, or two pies, or some combination of these, and then had worked here for hours getting a meal ready for the community. Aware of the ache in her legs now, she thought, I wonder what would happen if we
all quit. She saw the hall, deserted, weeds growing up through the steps, the windows broken or boarded up. Why, the community would fall apart. Nobody but us women would do this. There’d be no more community if we quit celebrating people’s anniversaries and weddings, births and deaths, departures and arrivals.

“Imagine,’ she said to Ruth, who had come to lean against the counter beside her, things were coming together now, the buffet tables were ready, the people were lining up and beginning to fill their plates, “if we all quit the club, if we all stopped working like this.” Ruth turned her head quickly to look at Selena, a surprised expression on her face. She laughed, a short, stout, older woman in a cheap, neat dress, looking up at Selena with wide amused eyes.

“I wouldn’t have varicose veins, maybe,” she said. “My God, the hours I’ve put in here on my feet. I’ve baked enough buns over the years to stretch from here to Swift Current and back again.” They relaxed, and watched their neighbours file by, filling their plates with the food they had prepared. “That’d be the end of the community,” Ruth said.

“Some of the towns are getting men’s service clubs,” Selena remarked.

“They think they can take our place?” Ruth asked. “Let them try. Did you ever know a man who could even remember his own anniversary, never mind anybody else’s? And who’d do the cooking?”

“They sure know how to make money,” Selena said. “Not like us, working our feet off just to break even.”

“Well, we don’t do it for the money,” Ruth pointed out.

“There’s not many young ones coming up to take over,” said Margaret, who had been listening to their conversation. “What with the kids getting away to the cities to school nowadays, and all them farms going down, people moving away.” She shook her head reflectively. “Heaven knows where it’ll all end.”

You could always depend on Margaret for doom and gloom, Selena thought. There’ll always be farms. Or will there? She risked a quick glance at Margaret, who after all had been here a lot longer than she had, and therefore ought to know more. But Margaret was smiling serenely at the people filing by, as if she herself hadn’t heard what she had just said.

Selena squeezed past everybody and looked out into the hall again. Louise and Barclay were seated at the head table, Louise wearing a corsage of pink carnations and smiling happily, Barclay solemn, wearing his seldom-worn grey suit and navy tie. Phoebe was still sitting at the table by the door. Diane, Tony, and their two little girls had just entered. Tony was bent over, signing the guest book, and Diane was shooing the girls ahead of her, straightening their dresses, then looking down the length of the hall. She saw Selena standing in the doorway, smiled, then bent her head again to her children as if she were smiling over some wonderful secret. It had been so long since Selena had seen Diane really smile that she felt a lightening of some burden she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying, and she turned back to the kitchen half-smiling herself, wondering, what’s she so happy about?

At last, when all the adults were seated at the tables, the small children already dodging chairs, tables and people’s legs, congregating at the back door and in the cloakroom with the door shut, or racing up and down any open spaces they could find, unabashedly screaming, the women in the kitchen filled their own plates and moved out into the hall to find places to eat beside their own families or with each other. Selena saw Tammy leave her place beside Diane. Quickly she filled her plate and went to squeeze in the empty spot Tammy had left.

“Where’s Rhea?” she asked Diane.

“She said she was too tired to come, that it was too much for her,” Diane replied, picking up a bite of raisin pie with her fork.

“That’d be the day an thing was too much for Rhea,” Selena said, laughing, and Diane laughed with her.

“She gets stranger all the time.” Diane shook her head. Cathy sat on her right, next to Tony, who was occupied talking to Gus, Kent’s older brother. The weather, Selena thought, the hoppers, grain prices. They never got sick of it. She noticed that Diane was wearing her favourite dress again, the red one with the low neck, and that her long, dark hair caught the light and shone. Remembering how distraught Diane had been a month before, she was pleased, then wondered what this meant.

“What are you so happy about?” she asked. The teenage girls were making their way among the tables now, filling the cups with coffee or tea. Diane had to lean forward so that Tracey could squeeze past behind her.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Selena,” she said, laughing, moving close to Selena to be heard above the noise. “But, I’m leaving this place.” The forkful of food Selena had just swallowed seemed to stick in her throat. Diane was still looking at her with delight in her eyes. “Don’t look so horrified,” she said, laughing. “Tony’s coming with me.”