Bone Coulee

by Larry Warwaruk

  “What time is it?” Nick says, looking up at the café clock. “My goodness! Half past ten. I’ve got a B-train coming out from Saskatoon to load durum. I’m supposed to meet him at the bins at eleven. Want to come with me, Jeepers?”

  Jeepers stares at Lee’s papers, fidgets with the peak of his cap, then follows Nick out of the café.

  “Don’t put your back out shovelling,” Pete says, and he spits the toothpick he’s been chewing on into his empty cup.

  “Why do you need the RM equipment?” Mac says. “You don’t need to build up any grade. You can get vehicles down that trail just as it is. Unless it rains. You build up a road grade, it will be a worse mess if it rains.”

  “Mac’s right,” Abner says.

  “Everybody drives down there for rodeo,” Mac says. “Just the way it is. We’ve done the same for years.”

  “We got money from the Federal Millennium Fund,” Lee says. “And the Provincial Heritage Foundation. And if we tear down the old corrals that are collapsing anyway, and build new ones further away from the spring water, we can get a grant from the Department of the Environment.”

  “Thanks to the Harper government,” Sid says.

  “The light show will be our biggest expense,” Eddy says. “Not every day do you recruit a Disney World producer.”

  “Another Saskatchewan expatriate,” Sid says. “That’s this socialist province. Any young man with brains leaves.”

  “That’s been our problem all along,” Mac says. “All that are left are the ones with no brains.”

  “When the Sask Party wins, they’ll come back,” Pete says. “You’ll see.”

  “They’ve already been coming back these past four years,” Abner says. “Under an NDP government.”

  “You still here, Abner?” Sid says. “How come you’re not out on the campaign trail with Johnny Puff and his Green Car?”

  “I might just do that this afternoon,” Abner says. “Let people know that the NDP has more to offer than the Sask Party’s free beer and pizza.”

  “What about beer?” Pete asks. “Are we going to set up a beer tent?”

  “I don’t think we should,” Lee says. “It wouldn’t look good with Pastor Eddy as our candidate.”

  “That’s up to the rodeo committee,” Eddy says. “Not up to us.”

  “Beer tent’s a big money-maker,” Sid says.

  “In the old days, people brought their own beer,” Mac says.

  “We’ll leave it up to the rodeo committee,” Lee says. “I’m on that committee. Maybe Sid has a point. We’ll need the extra money to help pay for the light show. Have we got everything straight? Rodeo Friday night and Saturday afternoon. Disney World light show Saturday night with fireworks. Christian cowboy church service Sunday morning. Rodeo finals Sunday afternoon. This Saturday we go full bore. We’ve only got two weeks left to get that grade built into the coulee.”

  • Chapter 17 •

  But the Indians don’t leave the province, and the way Garth Chorniak has been hanging around Angela, it doesn’t look as if he will either.

  “Glen left the cart with you?” Angela asks.

  “Yeah,” Garth says, “and he said to go ahead and use it. He said that you might enjoy a ride in the coulee. I’m storing it in the barn for him until he needs it for next year’s Batoche Days.”

  “Can’t you just imagine? My very own kokum was a child riding in a cart like this, and right here, one hundred years ago. Right where we are.”

  Garth and Angela follow a trail along the bottom of the coulee towards the stink lake. It’s mid-morning, and flock after flock of geese fly overhead, returning from their morning feed. They hover at the mouth of the coulee, looping round and round as they descend to the water.

  Angela has her sketchbook open, deciding whether or not to draw the birds, but then she closes it and stuffs it into her carrying bag. She wonders what Garth knows about the murder of her uncle Thomas, and all at once she feels like a traitor to be down here on a joyride with a Chorniak.

  “Whoa, Dan. Whoa.” The horse is Garth’s pet, his big quarter-horse gelding hitched to the shafts of Glen Wilkie’s Red River cart. “Will you look at that! More tipi rings, and one big one. Twice as big as the others. Must be a chief! Do you think so, Angela?”

  “I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Might they have had a tent for horses?”

  “I think it’s unlikely, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “Let’s stop here and give Dan a rest. The way he’s been trying to grab a bite of grass along the way, he’s likely hungry. I’ll unhitch and let him graze.”

  “You don’t think he’ll take off?”

  “He might if we were closer to home. But down here he’ll stick close to the cart.”

  “It would be a long walk…, for us.”

  Garth spreads a blanket on the grass and he lies down, his chin cupped in his hands. Angela sits beside him.

  “That big tipi ring,” he says. “Must be somebody special.”

  “A sacred place. All of this, a sacred place.”

  “You could have a big rally down here, like the Easter pageant in the Black Hills in South Dakota.”

  “That’s the same thing as what the black robes always used to do to our people; put on an Easter pageant in the same place where the last of our buffalo disappeared. No Easter pageant here. This coulee is its own pageant.”

  “Wait till you see the light show,” Garth says.

  “The stars in the sky are enough,” Angela says.

  “You sure are some back-to-nature person,” Garth says.

  “There is not much prairie left,” Angela says. “Everything is plowed.”

  “Grandpa has an old Ukrainian story about unplowed land. It’s a story from the Hutsuls, who were some kind of hillbilly mountain people. They said that at the beginning of the world there was only water. One day God was walking on the water, and he noticed something whirling in a foam.”

  “The Cree have a creation story where everything was water,” Angela says.

  “I know. The trickster, Whiskey-Jack and Muskrat.”

  “That’s one of the stories. I know of two. The other is where Coyote asks four ducks to dive to the bottom for mud.”

  “The Ukrainians have God and the Devil. Who art thou? God asked the thing whirling in the foam. I am Aridnyk, the Devil answered. I’m alive, but I cannot walk. God gave him arms and legs, and the two of them went about as sworn brothers. But when they became tired of walking on the water, God decided to make land, but he couldn’t get clay from the bottom of the sea. God knew everything in the world, but he wasn’t much good at doing anything. But the Devil had the power to do anything, and he said, I could dive down there. Then dive down, God answered. So the Devil dove down, picked up a handful of clay and put the rest in his mouth. God took the clay from the Devil’s hand and scattered it, blessing the earth, and everything grew. But the clay in the Devil’s mouth also grew. It grew and grew until it forced the Devil’s mouth open. He couldn’t breathe, and his eyes bulged out. Spit, God said. The Devil spit and spit, and wherever he spit, mountains grew.”

  “I see,” Angela says. “So it’s God’s land for grain, and the Devil’s land for grazing.”

  “Kind of a reversal of Cain and Abel, Grandpa tells me.” Garth goes to the cart for a lunch cooler. He sets it on the blanket and takes out a bottle.

  “Mike’s Hard Berry Vodka Cooler,” he says, and lifts the bottle in the air. Angela takes it from him and sets it down on the blanket. Her thoughts shift back in time. She tries to visualize a young Mac Chorniak. She looks at Garth and tries to compare, tries to imagine Garth as a murderer.

  “Your grandfather can’t be much of a religious man, with a story like that.”

  “I don’t know, but he told me that when he was boy his family had to go a long way at Easter to attend a Ukrainian church. You see all kinds of them with the big onion domes along the Yellowhead Highway, all th
e way from Yorkton to Edmonton. Before Grandma Peggy died, she insisted that she be buried on the Catholic side of the cemetery. She didn’t want her bones to spend eternity lying in the same ground as some Protestant Orangeman. Grandpa says it doesn’t matter to him whose ground it is, as long as they plant him beside Grandma Peggy.”

  Garth puts his hand on Angela’s shoulder, but she draws herself away from him.

  “How much more do you know about your grandfather?”

  “Like what?”

  “Things he did when he was young. Did he play sports?”

  “I know he liked to hunt. Mostly deer. I know that he didn’t bother with geese, but he says there really weren’t any geese to hunt back then. Only ducks. He hates ducks. He says he lost a lot of crop to ducks in the wet fifties.”

  “Did he play baseball?”

  “He says that he used to pitch, but he doesn’t talk much about it.”

  Angela gets off the blanket and walks over to the centre of the big tipi ring.

  “Do you know about the murder?”

  “What?”

  “The sports day in 1950. An Indian was killed.”

  “Murdered?”

  More and more geese swirl down from the sky, wings spread at odd angles, turning sharply in a cacophony of sound. Garth looks up at this distraction.

  “An Indian was killed at the Duncan Sports Day?”

  “Then you don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what? Angela, what has this got to do with Grandpa and baseball?”

  “Everything.” Angela leaves the circle and sits back down on the blanket, face to face with Garth. “There was a fight.”

  She tells Garth about her uncle Thomas. She names the ballplayers who were there. Angela’s mother was there, and Mac Chorniak.

  “Grandpa? Do my parents know of this?”

  “It was so long ago. Over fifty years. Your parents weren’t even born. I don’t know how well white men keep secrets. Not even a lot of our people know at Three Crows, but some do. And not everybody there is innocent. One Elder says that the white men’s lawyer paid off certain important Indians to raise doubts at the trial.”

  Garth rises to his feet and walks around to the far side of the Red River cart.

  “The Chorniaks. I’m a Chorniak. It’s supposed to be a good name around here. A name people respect. I was getting to think about you and me…what people might think about me hanging out with someone like you. The whole race thing. Here was me thinking that I’ve got a family reputation to protect. I’m a fool. I see now that you coming to live here in Duncan was not just because of the job in Bad Hills.”

  “It’s mostly my mother. She wants to make things right no matter how long it takes. She wants those men at least to acknowledge what they did.”

  “Do they have a clue who you are?”

  “I don’t think so, but maybe they do. Maybe they are getting a little suspicious. Mother is waiting for just the right time to confront your grandfather.”

  Garth walks away from the wagon, further away from Angela, to his horse. “Hey, Dan,” he says. “Good old trustworthy Dan. To trust somebody like me.” He reaches down and grabs a handful of grass. Dan nibbles at it, and presses in close to nudge Garth’s chest.

  “Gee, Angela, I’m sorry,” Garth says, returning to the blanket. “How do you fix something like that? Glen knew all along? And here he lets me use his cart. Lets me bring you down here. You let me bring you down here.”

  “But you didn’t know, and right now that is all that matters. Let’s quit talking about it. Let’s leave it alone for now.”

  Angela reaches forward. With her fingers at the arch of his boot, she rubs the denim hem of his pant leg. He looks at her, but her eyes are lowered. A strand of her hair falls curling down to her mouth. She blows at the hair, her lips making a popping sound. Garth tugs a branch of creeping juniper from the ground. He holds it to his nose, then extends the branch forward, brushing Angela’s bare arm.

  “You gonna try some Mike’s Hard Berry Cooler?”

  “I don’t need a cooler; I need a sweater.” Angela looks skyward to the splatter of white clouds. “Or I need the sun to break through the clouds.”

  “Here. My coat.” Garth takes off his denim jacket and drapes it over her shoulders, letting his hands stray along her back.

  “You are warm,” she says. His ear touches hers, and he drops the juniper branch. They hear the horse grazing. They can hear the crisp rip of grass, can see the folds of the horse’s mouth inching this way and that, as if massaging the turf.

  • Chapter 18 •

  Roseanna is starting to feel that she is missing out on things. Her son gets to drive all over the country, and her daughter gets to ride all day in a Red River cart. Both Glen and Angela know that she must get lonesome sitting in the backyard talking to an owl. It would do her some good if she could get out to see some country, and on a day when Glen has to attend to some land business, the opportunity arises.

  “A different car?” Roseanna asks as Angela and Glen help her out of the house. Glen has driven his ’87 New Yorker up close to the back step. They are going to drive out to the land that Three Crows has purchased from Abner and Jen Holt. Glen wants to get a better handle on what the band should be charging to rent the land out.

  “Some rig, eh?” Glen says.

  “Where did you get it?” Angela asks.

  “An old lady in Saskatoon. The car sat in her garage for eleven years after her husband died. Only 79,000 kilometres. Look at all the room for you in the back seat, Mother.”

  “What is that contraption for?” Roseanna says as Glen helps her into the car.

  “A wheelchair,” Glen says.

  “It’s too hard for you to get around with your walker,” Angela says.

  “You’ll have to push me. What good is that? You think I’m a cripple or something?”

  “You don’t have to use it in the house,” Angela says. “But when we go somewhere it will be easier for you to get around, and safer.”

  “We’ll be back this afternoon? I want to watch them knock down the elevator.”

  “We’ll be back in time for lunch at the café, and then we’ll watch the demolition. I want to sketch it as it collapses.”

  “Your owl is making short work of those gophers,” Glen says. His son, Tommy, had snared two of them and sent them with Glen. “You think it is ever going to fly again?”

  “It’s not my owl,” Roseanna says.

  “Now Mother, we know you like it,” Glen says.

  “Death bird,” Roseanna says.

  When they drive up the lane to the Holts’ abandoned farmyard, they spot the moose that Mac and Abner had seen, but not only the cow with its calf. They also see a huge bull moose.

  “Look at the size of that bull!” Glen says. “And the horns!”

  “People around here see them as pets,” Angela says.

  “Next time I come, I’ll bring my rifle.”

  As for the real purpose of their drive out here, there’s not a lot that Glen can learn regarding how much Three Crows should ask for rent. One stubble field looks the same as the next, and really, the issue is not so much about how much rent to charge as about how much Indians should be paying for more land. Bone Coulee is of special interest to them, not so much for the grain land, but for the coulee itself, and what it represents.

  “Do you think Mac Chorniak would sell it?” Glen asks Angela.

  “He likes to think he’s preserving heritage,” Angela says. “But selling is another matter.”

  “He keeps the duck,” Roseanna says.

  “Keep working on him,” Glen says.

  “She would rather work on his grandson,” Roseanna says.

  “Don’t you think that Uncle Thomas’s death has to be resolved before anything happens?” Angela asks. “It should have been dealt with long before now.”

  “Like everything else,” Glen says.

  “All we do is talk and do nothing,” Ros
eanna says. “You should do something, Glen.”

  “You know the mess as well as I do, Mother. Some of our people were paid off to keep their mouths shut.”

  “So you keep yours shut?”

  “Let’s not fight,” Angela says. “And let’s get back to town. I want to sketch the elevator.”

  When the Wilkies come through the door of the café, coffee row hunches around its tables, like wagons in a circle. Pete glances over his shoulder, then quickly avoids Roseanna’s stare. Esther Rawling and Jen sip tea at the window table.

  Everyone is here preparing to witness the final demise of their last remaining elevator, and as Pete would tell it, just one more swindle by the money men who started all the schemes in the first place.

  “Where there’s a swindle,” Pete says, “you’ll find a Scotsman. MacKenzie and Mann started the Grand Trunk Pacific with just $5,000 of their own money. Hey?”

  Sid rolls his eyes, then stands to walk over to the window where Esther and Jen sit. He looks up and down the street, as if expecting the arrival of a train. The others lean their heads forward, listening to Pete, who now talks loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  “They formed the railway company, another company to build stations, one more for the ties and timbers. Hey? Hey? Even another company to manufacture the steel rails.” Pete pauses to stare at his empty cup, waiting for Tung Yee to fill it.

  “Anyone else, coffee?” she asks.

  “Each company sold supplies at high prices to the Grand Trunk Pacific, and MacKenzie and Mann asked the federal government for more money to pay the bills so they could finish the project.”

  “They finally went broke?” Mac asks.

  “Bankrupt,” Pete says. “But that’s not my point. Only Grand Trunk Pacific went broke. That railway was then nationalized by the federal government to form the CNR, which, against all rules of bankruptcy, was charged to carry a loan to pay off all the creditors; all of Mackenzie and Mann’s other companies. Every year the CN paid eighty million dollars a year interest on that loan. Then, over half a century later, Brian Mulroney sold the CNR, but before he did that, he let the government pay off the loan in full so that the new CN wouldn’t be saddled with the debt.”