by Muriel Gray
Katie, sitting against Sam’s chair at his feet, looked up at Gerry, who’d come back in with a coffee for her wrecked husband. He tried to pass Sam the steaming mug, and when it was ignored, placed it on the stone hearth and sat down on the sofa next to Ann. They felt useless. They could be good in a crisis, Gerry and Ann. When Katie had gone into labor with Jess, they had been there, soothing the panicking Sam, looking after Billy and sorting things out. That was what they were good at. But how could they help when they didn’t know what the crisis was? Sam wouldn’t talk to them. Billy wouldn’t talk to them. Katie couldn’t talk to them without crying. The Hunt household had gone from the big happy place of laughs and perpetual hospitality to a vale of tears. And nobody seemed to know why.
Katie stroked Sam’s free hand that was hanging limply over the arm of his chair and he withdrew it. She looked like he’d slapped her.
Gerry noted the expression on Katie’s face and cleared his throat. “Look. Wouldn’t it be best if we could all just talk?”
Sam raised his eyes slowly to Gerry, as if realizing for the first time that he was there. “About what?”
Gerry held Sam’s gaze. “About what’s up with you, mostly.”
In Sam’s dark eyes, something like fire kindled. “Nothing’s up with me. What’s up with you?”
“Meaning?”
“Got no life? Get off on spending a silent evening in a room, staring at two people who want you to go?”
Katie’s fingers closed on her sleeve. “Sam!”
“Sure. We got better things to do.” He paused and then looked away from Sam. “You want us to go, Katie?”
Her eyes were wide. “Of course not. Have your coffee.”
Sam was still staring at Gerry as though the man on his couch were brandishing a knife instead of holding a brown mug with some poorly painted ears of wheat on the side. “This is my house. I want you to go.”
There was silence, and when Gerry spoke again he experienced a sensation that he had only encountered once in his adult life. Plenty in childhood, but never as an adult. It was that horror of ugly words formed secretly in the safety of your head reaching your mouth before you had time to catch them and replace them with something more acceptable. The words were there and he was standing somewhere inside his own body watching them being spoken as though he were not the speaker.
“Actually, it’s Katie’s house.”
The air in the room almost shifted with his words. Katie replied softly, “Now I want you to go.”
Sam stood up slowly as if neither Gerry nor Katie had spoken at all, and he was merely on his way to get a cookie from the kitchen or go to the bathroom. He took two steps toward the sofa, stopped in front of Gerry and, with one sudden and violent arc of his arm, punched the mug out of Gerry’s hand with a clenched fist. The speed sent it smashing against the wall below one of June Crosby’s framed watercolors of Wolf Mountain, the dripping coffee on the wall not only echoing Mrs. Crosby’s painting technique, but in this case bettering it.
Sam’s arms hung by his side, the restrained power in his body visible in the way a puma ripples before striking its prey. “Get the fuck out.”
Gerry opened his mouth to speak, decided to close it again, then stood up in the limited space afforded him by Sam’s looming figure. Ann sprang up at his side, while beside the chair, Katie sat white-faced and disbelieving. The Hunts’ two closest friends left the living room, and then the house, in silence and misery. Behind them, two figures remained motionless as though waiting for the curtain to fall from a proscenium arch. Katie stared at Sam’s back until he turned around.
The tiny cut below Sam’s left cheek had started to bleed again, and this time Katie let it. She spoke in a barely audible, breathy voice, “Welcome home, sweetheart.”
Her voice had a dark, malicious barb in it that had never once been given life in their entire marriage. Sam turned his gaze to Katie, as though surprised that anything was wrong with savaging their friend, and saw the malice was in her eyes as well as her voice. The sight of that pale, pretty face twisted into something approaching hate brought Sam Hunt back from wherever he’d been, and both eyes moistened as his shoulders slumped into a dejected hunch.
She looked at him for a long time, wondering who this tall stranger was standing weeping before her, until a large tear rolled down Sam’s cheek. It broke that membrane of distaste she had held up between them, and her own tears flowed for the second time that evening. She covered her face with her hands, and Sam walked slowly back to the chair, sat down and put a hand on her head.
Katie gulped on a sob and put her aching head on his thigh. “Talk to me, honey. Please. Talk to me.”
Sam put his head back, closed his eyes and concentrated on stopping his tears from falling from under the closed lids.
“What about?”
“Everything. What’s happening here?”
“I don’t know.”
They sat like that for an age, Katie trying to find a crack in the wall that was always rebuilding itself with bricks of mistrust and fear every time she climbed it. She rubbed her cheek on that long hard thigh and struggled to make sense of her feelings.
“Then tell me who you are.”
Sam bent forward and took her face in his hands. It was such a beautiful face. Pointed chin, blond hair streaked with a darker hue that made it change with every toss of her head, surprising dark arched eyebrows, and those eyes, those blue intense eyes with tiny laughter lines creeping from the corners that Sam prided himself in creating over a decade.
“Does it matter?”
She looked up at him, her face cupped in his brown hands like she had a beard made of fingers. “It didn’t used to. But somehow it feels like it does now.”
Sam’s face crumpled. What would she make of his life? Sam rubbed at the cuts on his face. Maybe he should find out.
This woman was his life now. She was everything. The past had already burst through, and it was pounding him to a pulp with its dark, fetid force. Making him act crazy.
What if he were to share some of it with her? He had always thought that to let it through, to think of it for a moment would destroy him. That somehow the past would sneak up and grab away everything happy and whole and good. Would it make a difference if she knew the foul stock her husband came from? She was still at his feet, watching his face contort, her hand brushing his thigh to soothe him. She spoke quietly.
“I’m Katie Hunting Wolf. We both know that now.”
He nodded.
“So who were your family, Sam? Tell me.”
His family. His family were here in this house. There had never been any others. Not really. He closed his eyes, took hold of her hand and let his head rest on the back of the chair. She waited.
“Marlene Mary Crowfeather married Moses James Hunting Wolf. They had three children, but only one survived and you’re holding his hand.”
She squeezed it in response. Katie’s heart was beating faster. She was frightened at the tenor of Sam’s voice, which had taken on an unfamiliar pitch, and frightened of what he was going to tell her that made it so hard for him to do so. She had been shocked and angry at what he had done to Gerry and Ann, but now she was scared. She listened.
“I lost my front teeth when I was a kid. Moses tried to pull me out from under the box bed in the back of the cabin while Marlene held on to his legs, screaming. I could see her face from under there, and she was yelling at him in Cree to leave her baby alone. Her baby.” Sam made a sour face. “Can’t recall what I did to make him so mad. Most likely nothing. And when he couldn’t pull me out, he took an iron fencepost and stabbed it around under there till he got me. I was lucky it was the teeth. He was aiming to get an eye or break a bone. I was six. You grow more teeth.”
He kept his eyes closed, but he could hear Katie’s breathing and knew she was starting to cry.
“When I was eight, I would have lost my cherry on the floor if I hadn’t have grabbed a beer bottle out from
under my pappy’s chair and smashed it on his head while he tried to hold me down. He never did get his old rocks off on me. I could run and hide in the woods for weeks and no one could find me. No, I lost my cherry to a white girl who nearly ripped it off me. Darcy Jenkins.”
You mished yourshelf, Shammy.
Jesus. No. Sam bit his lower lip at the thought of the horror. Carry on. Get it out. Katie was still there. The world hadn’t ended. Yet.
“Moses beat Marlene so bad she lost an eye, then he let her die in her own vomit when he and his buddies were all juiced on pure ethanol.”
“Oh, Sam. My God.”
Katie was weeping again now. The hand that was not gripping his like a vise was over her mouth, trying to hold back her grief.
“Had a talent for killing. He killed my grandpappy. Eden James Hunting Wolf. Used to be the Kinchuinick chief and shaman. Killed him for this dumb thing.”
He put his hand inside his clothes without opening his eyes and flicked out the small bone amulet. It flopped onto the fabric of his sweater and hung there innocently while its owner continued to horrify his wife.
“Worth killing an old man for, huh?”
His finger rubbed at it lightly, almost as if the answer were yes.
“I took up with a preacher who was on the reservation trying to save us Indians. He liked me. Used to give me money for odd jobs, clearing the snow from the yard, painting the fence, that kind of Huckleberry Finn shit. And I guessed he thought that if he couldn’t save me, he would try and educate me. He taught me to ski at Tamarack. Once we even went as far away as Lake Louise to ski the back bowls.
“And he made me stop speaking like an Indian and made me think it would maybe be OK not to live on the reservation.” He opened his eyes and looked at Katie, whose eyes were tiny with her silent crying. “ ‘Cause you know most Kinchuinicks think they’ll die or something the moment they step off-reservation. Think that there’s no oxygen out here in the white man’s land. But after his daughter Darcy jumped me—OK, maybe I was willing too, but anyway I figured the Reverend Jenkins might not want to see me around so much after that—I learned you could live and breathe here, and nothing would ever make me go back there. Nothing.”
He squeezed her hand.
“I didn’t want that shit’s name, so I just dropped the Wolf bit and, presto, at least when I phoned up for a job they said they’d see me. ‘Course their faces fell when I turned up, and somehow the position had always just been filled a moment before I got there. But I kept at it and eventually Jim Henderson at Fox Line gave me a job in Silver.”
Katie smiled weakly. “God bless him.”
“For sure.”
“What happened to your father?”
So it was over then. The honesty. This far and no farther. The lies would have to start again, and he fell into the pit that he knew had sides of glass.
“Don’t know. People say they think he went to Calgary. Probably died drunk in an alley someplace.” Oh God, that he should lie to her again.
Katie detected the change of tone in Sam’s voice and rubbed his hand to get him back before he slipped from her again. She sniffed and changed her tone too. “So your amulet was your grandfather’s.” She just caught him.
“Yeah.”
“It’s a very old and very rare symbol. Called an Isksaksin, meaning ‘line’ or ‘boundary.’ But I guess you know all about it.”
Sam couldn’t help his tone, that of a man who had just heard a child recite the alphabet. “How’d you know that?”
“You know that place I go to work in every day? Well, strangely enough it has this weird word museum on the sign outside. I just noticed it one day and then, hey, I also noticed all the cases had these real funny old things in them…”
“Yeah. OK. Hardy-har.”
“Of course I know, Sam. I just never had the opportunity to talk to you about it. Or more like, I knew you wouldn’t want to hear it.”
She looked at him to see if that would wound him. It wasn’t meant to. And it hadn’t. He just looked dazed.
“What else you know about it?”
“You want the full school lecture tour?”
“Yeah.”
She touched the curious-shaped amulet, running her finger over the indentations that scored the not quite circular bulk of it. It was a good excuse to touch Sam’s chest too.
“Well, yours obviously can’t be the original, which is supposed to have been made from the skull of Pitah Annes, Eagle Robe, the greatest ever Kinchuinick shaman, who was around in the sixteenth century. But we’ve got a book in the museum by an English archaeologist with a drawing of the Isksaksin in it, and this is the absolute double. Bored yet?”
He shook his head, his face darkening. She tapped the bone.
“It’s a real curious one, since this is about the only Kinchuinick charm that doesn’t come with a list as long as your arm about what it can do. Most of these things, like, you know, claim they can heal, ward off, bad spirits or make you babies or something like that. But not this. In fact that English guy, P.R. Nicholson, said that the wearer wouldn’t discuss it, and he could find no living Indian who knew its purpose, but all were in awe of it.” She looked up at him with love through her puffy eyes. “I thought it was just like you to have something as special and mysterious as that around your neck.”
Sam’s head was reeling and he sat in silence staring into space in front of him.
“Sam?” Her voice was thick again.
“Mmm.”
“How did you survive?”
He looked away from her into a nothing distance, and spoke as if the answer were so obvious it was barely worth discussing. “I breathed in and out.”
She felt him doing it now, and she could barely speak. But she did. “I love you so much.”
He looked back at her, pulled her up to his knee and kissed her. She was crying through the kiss, and the salt ran into their mouths as they caressed each other’s lips with slow tongues and gentle teeth.
The door banged open as if it had been blown with explosives, the wooden handle thumping into the wall with such force it left an indentation in the plaster. Sam’s body went out of his control and he jumped up with a howl, his adrenaline pumping in his veins. Katie stumbled from his knee, making a small gasping noise.
It was Bart. He stood in the doorframe looking at them, mouth closed, ears cocked and alert. Katie put her hand to her own heart this time and exhaled like a runner.
“Jesus Christ, Bart! Give us a break!” She laughed, got her breath back and ran her hand through her hair.
“That’s what I call a dog that wants his dinner.”
Sam was breathing very fast through his nostrils, his mouth a tight line. The husky was looking straight at Sam with steady blue eyes, and if dinner was on its mind, it seemed in no hurry.
41
Alberta 1907
Siding Twenty-three
He wanted to lie. Looking around at all these frightened, raging faces, he wanted to say things that would help. But he could not.
“They found him in the morning. He had been missing all night.”
He said it quietly, but it was as though James Henderson had scored a try at rugby. The men burst into a shout that was triumphant and at the same time horrified. He held his hand up to them, pleading.
“Please. Please! Listen to me!”
They weren’t for any such nicety. They were for shouting their fury and clenching their fists.
“For the love of God! Listen to me! Hunting Wolf is no common murderer. The man is a great chief, chosen for his wisdom and compassion.”
There was a snort from the back of the canteen. Henderson ignored it and carried on.
“Why would he do such a brutal and unspeakable thing?”
And it was indeed unspeakable. Henderson was only just hanging on to his nerves. Muir spoke again. It was he who had become the inquisitor.
“You know why, Reverend. He defiled their religious ceremony.�
�� He spat on the floor, an uncommon gesture for Muir, whom Henderson thought of as a gentleman. “And piss on their religion. The blasphemous devils.”
The men shouted again, and Henderson hung his head in despair. No. Not Hunting Wolf. It was hard to imagine that any man alive could have wrought the frenzy that had gone on in McEwan’s cabin. Even the most ferocious of animals could not have inflicted such mutilation and horror. And it was certainly not the work of a man who possessed such deep, wise, intelligent eyes as did the handsome Kinchuinick chief. But the motive was there and now he had provided them with the fact that the Indian was abroad and unaccounted for at the time of the engineer’s death.
Henderson looked around the room. These men who raged about the savages should look at themselves. How ugly hate was. He had watched their faces often when they ate in here at night, and they were the faces of men thinking of home, passive and gentle and human, talking quietly over a stew or laughing occasionally at a jest. Now they were twisted and hideous as they vented their rage on their Native neighbors. Henderson wanted it to stop before he went mad. He played a wild card. “But what will you do if it is true?”
The question cut a slice into their ranting. Muir looked at him. “We will have them.”
The men fell silent again, watching Henderson, wary at his change of tack.
“And if that abomination is the handiwork of just one of their number, how will we, simple railwaymen, a cook and a man of God, hope to combat their fury with no outside help and no weapons?”
Muir looked around him. “This snow will not last forever, Reverend. The lines will open soon enough, and when the first train comes through, then we shall see. Oh yes. We shall see, all right.”
The men murmured.
“And will you stay alive long enough to see whatever it is you are expecting, Mr. Muir?”
He had not meant to say that. He wished it back into his mouth the moment it left his lips, but it was too late. He had changed the game with his question. The hunters looked at each other, realizing that they were in danger of being the hunted. Muir stared at Henderson with betrayed, defeated eyes.