Truth and Bright Water (13 page)

“Remember that platform you built in the grass and painted green?”

Monroe shakes his head and looks sad. “It was more difficult than I thought.”

“Why’d you paint it yellow? It’s really hard to see.”

“I didn’t. I keep painting it green.” Monroe goes to the porch railing. The kite string is still tied to the post. It heads off into the sky, vibrating as if the kite is still attached. I look, but there’s nothing to see. Monroe tugs on the string a couple of times and then lets it snap back. “Peer pressure. There’s not much you can do about it.”

“You mean the kite’s still there?”

“‘He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.’”

“So, what about the platform?”

Monroe shrugs. “Some of the ideas work, and some of them don’t.”

The dogs are on the run. They swing past the porch, take a hard left, and head towards the river. Monroe watches the dogs as they race through the grass, tussling and barking. Soldier is barking the loudest, and I can tell he’s having a great time. At the edge of the coulee, the Cousins suddenly change direction and plunge into a stand of chokecherries. Soldier is right behind them.

“Stop him.” Monroe puts his hand on my shoulder. “Call him back.”

“What?”

“Quick. Call him back!”

I’m too late. Before I can do anything, Soldier has disappeared into the bushes.

“Soldier!”

For a moment, you can hear the faint sound of barking, and then there is nothing. Monroe is off the porch in a flash. I’m right behind when I hear a sharp cry, and Soldier bursts out of the chokecherries.

“Soldier!”

He turns to the sound of my voice and loses his footing. He goes down in a heap, bounces up, and scrambles over to me.

“Okay, okay,” I say, and I squat down next to him and begin to pet him. He’s shaking so bad I think he’s going to rattle himself apart. And then he begins to pee. “Hey, watch it!”

Monroe kneels next to Soldier and runs his fingers through his fur. One side of Soldier’s neck is covered with blood. Monroe looks at me and shakes his head. “Bring him inside.”

Monroe heads for the church. I watch the bushes for the Cousins, but all I see is a large jackrabbit standing in the grass. It’s the kind that Soldier loves to chase. He never catches them, but that’s part of the game.

“Look at that,” I say, trying to take Soldier’s mind off his neck. I give him a pat to tell him it’s okay if he wants to chase it a little, but he doesn’t move. He lies next to me, pulls his ears back, and begins to growl. The rabbit is too far away to hear anything, but it turns to us anyway. Soldier jumps to his feet and begins barking. But it’s too late.

I don’t even see the dogs. They simply appear in the grass, three black streaks. The rabbit leaps and turns once, right into the jaws of the first dog and is crushed and torn in half. Soldier and I watch as the dogs drag the rabbit away. Just as they get to the edge of the coulee, Soldier growls and barks once. The Cousins stop and look at us for a moment. And then they slide into the bushes and disappear.

Monroe is in the kitchen, heating something on the stove. “Wash his neck with this.” The cut is long but not too deep. Soldier waits patiently while I clean the wound.

Monroe has been busy decorating the place. The rugs have been arranged on the floor, and the walls have been hung with paintings and photographs and pieces of woven cloth, some of which remind me a little of my mother’s quilt.

“Put some of this on it.” Monroe hands me a small jar. “Boy,” he says, “you got to watch those dogs.” Soldier is calmer now, and he’s stopped peeing. He puts his head in my lap and begins to whimper and cry.

“They’re tricksters, those ones,” says Monroe. “I’ll bet they didn’t mention the barbed wire.” He puts his face next to Soldier’s. “I’ll bet they didn’t tell you about the barbed wire at all.”

I rub the salve into the wound. Soldier doesn’t protest or flinch. He lies on the floor quietly. I rub his ears and scratch his chin. Every so often, he rolls his tongue around his muzzle and catches my fingers.

“Have you had breakfast?” says Monroe.

“A little.”

“You hungry?”

“Sure.”

“Can you cook?”

I’ve watched my mother cook, and I’ve warmed things up in a pan before, so I have an idea of what to do.

“Eggs Benedict,” shouts Monroe. “Home fries with onions and some very thin, crispy whole wheat toast.”

The refrigerator is mostly empty. There’s a quart of skim milk and half a bottle of prune juice. I look under the cupboards for the potatoes. Then I go back to the refrigerator. “You don’t have any eggs.”

“‘It is the nature of extreme self-lovers’”—Monroe’s voice echoes off the walls and it sounds as if he’s shouting down a well—“‘as they will set an house on fire…’”

“And you don’t have any potatoes.”

“‘…and it were but to roast their eggs.’”

“No onions either.”

“Bacon!”

“I don’t see any.”

Monroe comes through the kitchen in his wheelchair. Soldier trots along behind him. “No,” he shouts as he flashes past me, cutting a wide arc around the church. “Sir Francis!”

In the door of the refrigerator is a box of cereal. I shake the milk, and whatever is in the carton rattles. I put it back without looking. Monroe goes around the church a couple more times and then parks the chair under the stained glass window. “So,” he says, “what’s for breakfast?”

The cereal tastes a little weird at first, but the prune juice is sweet, and in the end, it’s not too bad. Monroe sighs, and leans back in the chair. “I was the best, you know.”

I look at the paintings on the wall. “Are all these yours?”

“These?” says Monroe. “None of these is mine.”

“So, what do you paint?”

“I don’t paint.”

I can see where trying to have a conversation with Monroe could be tricky. “But you’re a famous Indian artist.”

“Absolutely,” says Monroe, and he’s out of his chair and pacing around the church. “I went everywhere. Paris, Berlin, New York, London, Moscow, Madrid, Rome.”

“But you’re not a painter?”

“Oh, I did that for a while.” Monroe goes to the wall and straightens a small painting of a child holding a bird. “Made a bunch of money. Problem was, I was lousy. Stinko. Reactionary. Predictable.”

Monroe is on the move again, and I figure it’ll be safer if I stop asking questions and just let him talk. “What I was really good at was restoration.”

“Cool.”

“Nineteenth-century landscapes were my specialty.” Monroe comes back to the table and pours himself some more cereal. “Have you ever seen a nineteenth-century landscape?”

“Maybe on television.”

“They all look alike. Craggy mountains, foreboding trees, sublime valleys with wild rivers running through them.”

“My mother has a quilt with some of that stuff on it.”

“A primeval paradise. Peaceful. Quiet. Snow on the mountains. Luminous clouds in the sky. The rivers tumbling over dark rocks. Blah, blah, blah.”

Monroe pours some prune juice into the bowl and waits for the cereal to turn purple.

“I went around the world fixing paintings. They said my brushes were magic. You believe that?”

“Sure.”

“One day, the Smithsonian called me in to handle a particularly difficult painting. It was a painting of a lake at dawn, and everything was fine except that the paint along the shore had begun to fade, and images that weren’t in the original painting were beginning to bleed through.”

“And they pay you to fix things like that?”

“So I worked on the painting until it looked as good as new,” says Monroe. “But something went wrong.”

“You messed up?”

“The new paint wouldn’t hold. Almost as soon as I finished, the images began to bleed through again.”

“So, you had to paint it over.”

“You know what they were?” says Monroe.

“What?”

“Indians,” says Monroe. “There was an Indian village on the lake, slowly coming up through the layers of paint. Clear as day.” He goes to the kitchen, opens a drawer near the stove, and takes out the wig. “Now, where were we?”

“You were crazy.”

“I’m not crazy,” says Monroe. “But I am rich. Have we decided what I’m going to pay you?”

“Not yet.”

“No rush, I guess,” he says. “You see that tarp?” Monroe walks towards the back corner. I follow him. It’s dark there, and at first I don’t see a thing. “Take it off.”

The tarp is almost the same colour as the shadows. And it’s heavy. Lifting one edge is easy enough, but pulling it off is real work. Underneath is a long line of iron figures stacked against each other like folding chairs. Even up close, I can’t tell what they are supposed to be.

“Bring one out here,” says Monroe. “Let’s take a look at it.”

The figure is heavier than the tarp. I’m afraid of scratching the wood floor and I’m hoping that Monroe will take the wig off and help. But he doesn’t.

“What do you think?”

It’s a buffalo. Or at least, it’s the outline of a buffalo. Flat iron wire bent into the shape of a buffalo. I look back at the stack. There must be at least two hundred pieces.

“Three hundred and sixty,” says Monroe, reading my mind. “I had them made up before I left Toronto. It’s my new restoration project.”

“Neat.”

“I’m going to save the world.”

“They must be worth a lot of money.”

Monroe runs his hands along the curve of the iron, as if he is petting it. “We haven’t much time,” he whispers, and he looks around the church as if he expects to find someone hiding in the shadows. “We better get started.”

For the next hour, Monroe and I drag a dozen iron buffalo out of the church and hoist them into the back of his pickup. At first, I think all the buffalo are the same, but as we move them from the church to the truck, I can see that they are all different shapes and sizes. For the first couple of trips, Soldier follows us out to the truck and back again, barking the whole time. I figure he can smell the Cousins because he doesn’t wander off into the grass the way he normally does.

“Now for the fun part,” says Monroe. “Come on.” And he gets into
the pickup and starts the engine. I have just enough time to jump in the cab before he pulls it into first and takes off across the prairies. In the side mirror, I see Soldier bolt out of the grass and chase after us. I’m just getting settled into the seat when Monroe hits the brakes and we slide to a stop at the edge of the coulee. “Here we are.”

I get out and look back. We’ve only come about two hundred yards from the church. Soldier has been trotting along behind us, but when he sees that we have stopped, he picks up speed.

“You got any sweetgrass?”

“No.”

“Tobacco?”

“No.”

Monroe walks to the lip of the coulee and looks out across the river. “There’s Canada,” he says. Then he turns and spreads his arms. “And this is the United States.” He spins around in a full circle, stumbles, and goes down in a heap. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

I’m hot now, and I’m sweating, and I’m thinking that cleaning boxcars for the railroad wouldn’t be a bad job after all.

“We should have a ceremony,” says Monroe, dusting himself off. “Do you know any songs?”

“I know some musicals.”

“A traditional song would be better.”

“I know part of an honour song.”

“Perfect.”

Monroe beats his hand on the hood of the truck, and we stand on the prairies and sing the part of the honour song I know, and then Monroe insists that we sing the title song from
Oklahoma!
Monroe leaves his wig on for the honour song, but takes it off for “Oklahoma!” Soldier joins in, and when we finish, Monroe turns away and wipes his eyes.

“That was moving,” he says, “wasn’t it?”

“What do we do with the buffalo?”

What we do with the buffalo is drag four of them out of the truck and dump them on the ground. Monroe grabs a canvas sack out of the back, reaches in, and comes up with a long spike, the kind they use for laying track.

“Ever work on the railroad?”

“My grandfather did.”

“Okay,” says Monroe, and he throws his wig into the truck. “I’ll hold them and you drive them.”

Each of the buffalo has places on the feet for the spikes to go. Monroe steadies the buffalo with one hand and holds the spike with the other. “Don’t hit me.”

It’s a little tricky hitting the spike with the hammer and missing the buffalo and Monroe’s hand, but by the third buffalo, I get the hang of it. After we nail the fourth buffalo into the prairies, Monroe walks up a small rise and looks at the grouping. Then he runs down and we move one of the buffalo so it’s facing east.

“Beautiful.”

“Is this sort of…art?”

“‘My trade and my art is living,’” says Monroe. “You want some lunch?”

“We don’t have any lunch.”

“
Au contraire
,” says Monroe, and he pulls a zip-lock bag out of his pocket. Inside, I can see long strips of jerky. “There’s water in the truck, and you’re standing on dessert.”

We find some shade by the side of the pickup and settle in with the jerky and water. The wind is back now, and there are heavy clouds in the sky. But they are the thick, white kind that the wind kicks loose from the mountains and blows across the prairies in tall piles, and not the kind that bring rain.

“My auntie has a picture of you.”

“She does?”

“When you were young.” I’m not sure what to say next, so I eat the jerky and drink the water.

Monroe begins smiling and then he begins laughing. “Did I tell you I used to work for museums all over the world?”

“You restored paintings.”

“Little Turtle. The name of the painting was
Sunrise on Little Turtle Lake.
” Monroe turns and looks at the river. “Have you ever been in a museum?”

“No.”

“You know what they keep in museums?”

“Old stuff from the past?”

“That’s what they want you to think.” Monroe wipes his mouth with his shirt, bends over, picks off a couple of cactus berries, and pops them in his mouth. “So, you know what I did?”

This is a bad habit that Monroe has. Making hard turns when I’m not looking. I figure this is what happens when you go crazy. “I painted the village and the Indians back into the painting.” Monroe closes his eyes and settles in the grass. “Watch them in case they try to run away again.”