Bone Coulee

by Larry Warwaruk

  Jane follows after him. “Anything to add, Mr. Chorniak? A rebuttal? A concluding remark?”

  “I’ve lived in this country all my life.” He points to the northwest, to the broad flats that stretch up to Bone Coulee. “Once there were families. Kids going to school, and those who wanted to learn something finished their schooling and went away for more and never came back.”

  “People don’t co-operate any more,” Abner says.

  “They had to co-operate back then,” Mac says. “One man needed his neighbours to help harvest his one hundred and sixty acres of wheat. Now one man can harvest ten thousand acres all by himself, and he has no neighbours.”

  “People have changed,” Abner says. “No one gives two hoots for the next guy.”

  “No, Abner,” Mac says. “Not with the neighbours we still have left. A farmer finds out he’s got stomach cancer, and the next day there are six combines taking off his crop. A house burns down, and there’s a benefit dance raising money to buy clothes for the family. A kid gets smashed up in a car accident, and there’s a sports celebrity dinner for his rehabilitation.”

  “You’d agree, Mr. Holt?”

  “There’s a bit of Tommy Douglas still in us,” Abner says.

  “One more thing,” Jane says. “We’ve still got some time this afternoon. They told me at the university that there’s an Indian grave and medicine wheel somewhere out on a community pasture near the town of Elrose. While we’re on the subject of graves and First Nations, this might be worth seeing.”

  “East Butte,” Abner says.

  “You know about it?”

  “We’ve been there,” Mac says. “We’ll take you.”

  The drive is about an hour to the west. They come to a Texas gate at one of the entries to the community pasture and then follow a winding trail through the hills. Arriving at a high crest, they get out of the van and walk the rest of the way up to the top of East Butte.

  At one time, the pile of rocks at the very top of the hill would have been a mound as high as a man’s waist. But the mound has been dug out in the centre. Around the grave are three concentric circles of stones that form the outer nucleus of the medicine wheel.

  From up here they can see for miles in all directions. Is it a grave? Is it a grave of an important chief? Who carried up all of these stones, and who laid out the spokes of the medicine wheel? What is its meaning?

  “Peaceful up here,” Mac says.

  “Very peaceful,” Jane says. “The place is ancient, and seems almost alive with something.”

  “Must have been grave robbers,” Abner says.

  “How far are we from the Three Crows First Nation?” Jane asks. “I’d like to see an Indian cemetery.”

  “An hour or more east of Duncan,” Mac says. “We’d never get there in time today.”

  “I’ll ask Angela. Maybe they can take us.”

  “She’s a busy girl,” Mac says. “And now with getting the boutique ready for the opening, I don’t know if she’d find the time.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she can spare an afternoon. We’ll take her mother along to tell us about Indian funerals.”

  “You could ask her,” Mac says.

  • Chapter 21 •

  He’s calling about the buffalo skull,” Angela says to her mother.

  “Bonehead! Tell him he’s a bonehead! Tell him to take it back where it belongs!”

  Angela covers the receiver with her hand. “And he wants us to go on a picnic in Bone Coulee.”

  “He wants to take us on a picnic?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder…. What about the buffalo skull?”

  “He’s asking if it should be buried.”

  “Tell him you’ll call back in a few minutes, then wheel me outside to the cage.”

  The weather is unusually warm for late October, and the sky is cloudless. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be a perfect day for a picnic. Under ordinary circumstances, Roseanna would like nothing better than to be roasting bannock on a stick at a campfire in Bone Coulee. But her plans for Mac Chorniak are not ordinary.

  Mother and daughter sit in the backyard for several moments without saying anything, except for Roseanna’s cluck, clucking at the owl. The bird is like a magnet to her, repelling at one end, pulling at the other. There is good medicine and bad medicine. The owl is bad medicine, and that is good as long as it goes to Chorniak.

  “Eh, owl?” She wheels around, aiming the chair in the direction of Mac’s backyard. “What should we do with Chorniak? You are a wise bird, and you know the ways of the coulee. He wants to take us there. Angela will go. Can you help her? If you could fly, you would go, but you are trapped in your cage, just like me in my stupid chair.”

  “You’ll ride in the truck,” Angela says. “And then I will push you in the wheelchair.”

  “You want to go? I’m not stopping you. Is he taking his grandson with him?”

  “He didn’t say…of course his grandson is not coming with us.”

  “Why not? The four of us on a Sunday picnic. You couldn’t get any more romantic than that.”

  Roseanna wheels around again, this time facing Angela. “Ahh, romantic. What did Glen say? Work on him? On a picnic? Glen wants him to sell the coulee. Why don’t you go there with Chorniak, and tell him that he killed my brother.”

  “You don’t know that, Mother.”

  “You’re defending him?”

  “Well, we don’t know if it was actually him that did it.”

  “All of them killed Thomas.”

  “But who really did it? Wasn’t that the problem for the jury?”

  “The all-white jury. That was the problem.”

  “The court couldn’t pinpoint the cause of death. Was the murder weapon a fence post? And which one? Or did a car drive over him?”

  “Yeah, a car. The lawyer said that Thomas could have been drunk and passed out on the ground. Those liars. All those men are guilty and they know it, even if Chorniak pretends to be ever so nice. Phone him back and tell him that, yes, we want the buffalo skull buried. If he wants to picnic with you, go ahead and have your picnic. Maybe the spirits will help you.” Yet again she wheels her chair around.

  “What do you think, owl? Will the spirits help her?”

  “I suppose you are right. We have to confront him sometime. It may as well be now. Spirits or not, I can work on him. I’ll tell him that I’ll pack the picnic lunch. He can bring the wine.”

  “Loosen his tongue, eh?”

  They arrive at the east rim. The new grade down into the coulee is about half done, but the machines aren’t running. The municipality doesn’t work on Sundays. Mac and Angela get out of the truck to see a fallen-down fence and the steep incline of the buffalo jump.

  For Mac, this place at the top is a favourite spot. From here he has a view of the broad, sloping plain to Duncan. The fields are a vast geometry of stubble squares and rectangles. A combine still left in a field looks like a piece from a board game. But he remembers hauling grain at midnight, combine lights sifting through swirling dust, driving the truck loading on the move, staring up at Lee high up in the combine’s cab; the combine a giant of a machine, worlds bigger than a mere piece from a board game.

  “They carried the branches up a long way,” Angela says. “They had to carry them far.”

  “Carry what?”

  “Chokecherry branches.” Angela points to the plain. “Way out there. The women and children and old men carried branches to hide behind. Some boys went farther out towards the herd. They lay on the ground and covered themselves with the skins of buffalo calves. The boys made noises like injured calves. A buffalo cow approached them, and others followed. The boys continued their cries and crawled ever closer to the edge. It may have taken a day and a night to draw them in, maybe longer. The medicine man danced and prayed to the spirits as the herd drew ever closer. Then all at once, “Shoo, buffalo!” Everyone jumped up with the chokecherry branches. “Shoo, buffalo! Shoo!�
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  Angela looks back down over the jump, down to where the animals would have fallen. How it must have been to see that. Hear that. The thump of heavy bodies on heavy bodies, the snap of breaking bones. The grunts.

  But Mac sees grain land. In 1977 he netted over $235,000 on lentils. New crop in the country. No disease, and the price was high because of the high price of oil in the Middle East. The Arabs weren’t shy about paying top dollar for their lentils. He delivered the entire crop to the Pioneer, one of Duncan’s elevators since torn down.

  He sees abandoned yards in the distance. The farmers have let some of the yards stand. Left the trees for partridges and moose. Left a stove to rust in a two-room shack. Dumped rocks and garbage in a cellar hole.

  Farming has got to be more of a business than a way of life. All through the duration of Mac’s farming career the changes were made, but mostly in these last twenty years. But despite B-trains and computers, a farmer is still a farmer. He knows the ways of the land as other business people never will. Even chemical-company university agronomists never will. He knows the feel of the soil and its smell, much as Mac’s grandfather knew the chernozem soil of his Ukrainian homeland.

  But more changes are coming. Indians claim the land – forty thousand acres of land between here and Duncan, the broad stretch of the plain before him – and some of the farmers will sell, like Abner did. And they want Mac’s quarter section.

  Here the two are, Mac and Angela, an old white man and a young Indian woman. He’s a limping old man with sore joints, a senior with a broadening view of his surroundings, and a narrowing sense of smell. Yet he’s not dead. He recognizes the prairie grass, but he is not sure whether its scent is real, or just the imagined aromas of an old man’s yearnings. Might he wish that he could live his life over again? To begin at a time before the fatal sports day? To return to the eve of that sports day, and to look again into the eyes of that kewpie-doll girl?

  He stands over Angela, who is on her knees, bending and tying stems of sage. She makes figures of a man and a woman. She stuffs dry grass beneath the dolls, sprinkles tobacco, strikes a match. Smoke rises, and soon flames trickle up through the effigies. She waves her hands through the smoke, wafting it on herself, and at Mac’s legs. He steps back, watching her perform rites he doesn’t understand, and he wonders if she does.

  He wonders about Ezekiel and the valley that was full of bones, and about Cain with his offering that had no respect, and about the Ukrainian devil who spit out mountains. He will never be able to see what Angela sees, but when he looks down into the coulee, or out over the plains, he can feel his inheritance of Shevchenko’s wonder, and the poet’s love for the land.

  They drive to the other side, then down to the old Chorniak homestead. From there, they walk the rest of the way. Angela carries the picnic basket, and Mac carries the buffalo skull and the spade.

  “We’ll leave the skull where you found the duck,” Angela says. “And you can dig the hole.”

  “Where?”

  “Below the duck. Below where you found the duck.”

  “How deep?”

  “I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  She takes a flannel blanket from her basket and spreads it on the ground. Then she puts the skull on a corner of the blanket, rolling it into a neat parcel.

  “Dress him up?” Mac asks, resting a moment on the handle of his shovel and wiping his brow.

  “Think of it as my medicine bundle.” She lays the parcel in the hole, sprinkles tobacco and murmurs a prayer she learned in her Cree language class. “You can fill it in now.”

  They walk along the floor of the coulee, past the rodeo corrals and the tipi rings, to the rock where the Indian women used to scrape the buffalo hides. Angela takes another blanket from her basket and spreads it on the ground. She lies on her stomach. Mac sits on the grass, his forearms propped on his raised knees, his back planted against the face of the sun-warmed rock.

  “Tuna or egg?”

  “Just what you’ve got there in your hand,” Mac says.

  “Tuna,” she says, tossing him the sandwich still in its plastic wrap.

  “Pass me the bottle,” Mac says. Yesterday he bought the wine at the liquor store in Bad Hills.

  “Red or white?” the clerk asked. Mac hadn’t considered one colour or the other, but when confronted with a choice he thought white sounded more appropriate; less lusty. The clerk then asked if he had any special white wine in mind, and he told her to make a suggestion.

  “How about a chardonnay?” she said, and he told her that would be just fine.

  Mac remembers that they were drinking homebrew the night of the sports day dance. It was Pete’s idea to go to the camp, and it didn’t take much convincing to get them all to go. “For smoked meat,” he said. Mac wanted to see the kewpie-doll girl. The more he drank, the better the idea seemed. Did they even regard Indians as real people back then? Had he not been drunk, and had he been able to get to know that girl, would he have regarded her in the same light as he sees Angela today? What if Angela actually knows something about what happened? If she does, surely she wouldn’t consent to be down here with him. He could tell her, but then she’d want details.

  “Mr. Chorniak?”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s me. I’m talking to you. Angela.”

  “Oh, oh…. I must have been dozing. Drowsy after all that walking. Here, pass me the corkscrew.”

  Mac hasn’t been on a picnic since before he lost Peggy. Esther talked about reliving the old times, getting Abner and Jen to join them for an outing. He remembers the times with Peggy; the smell of the coffee she brought in a quart sealer wrapped in a towel to keep it warm, coffee rich with farm cream, and sugar. Here he is now with a bottle of white wine.

  Angela sits up, holding forward a Styrofoam cup for Mac to fill.

  “Chardonnay and Styrofoam,” she says. Her feet shoot straight out in front, toes wiggling inside her beaded moccasins. She sips her wine, then sets the cup aside. She takes a dream catcher from her basket – a circle of thinnest willow, cotton thread, lace, an oriole’s feather – and she blows through it to rustle the feather. She places the dream catcher back into the basket and takes out a Tupperware bowl. She snaps off the lid and scoops fruit salad into two Styrofoam bowls.

  “My kokum’s spoon,” she says.

  “Special, eh?” Mac says. “It looks old. Handcrafted.”

  “A century old. From willow taken right here. To have Kokum’s ladle with me brings her spirit closer. And it takes me back to her youth, especially being down here.” Angela gets to her feet and walks towards the tipi rings. She wastes no time in her movement, each step firm and direct. She bends to pick something off the ground, then walks back to the blanket with the same quick steps. She hold out her open hand.

  “A bone chip,” she says. “I bet it’s from the piles of bones that Kokum said were down here.”

  “My grandfather hauled them out,” Mac says.

  “The rest of them,” Angela says. “After he chased out Kokum’s family.”

  “That was then,” Mac says. “No one lives here now. Not your family, not mine. And maybe that’s how it should stay.”

  Sunlight covers the grass of the coulee floor, and it covers the yellowed leaves of chokecherry bushes. These trees hog the sun away from the narrow draws and crevices of the reclining hillsides. Mac senses the musk in the contours of the breaks and rises of the banks. They undulate to the horizon. Then up towards the horizon he sees her as a living part of the hills; the hazy flow of a woman’s body, reclined for her rightful share of the sun, a body Shevchenko would see were he here.

  “Yes,” Angela says, “My family was chased out. It wasn’t right then, and it still isn’t right. That is why there are land claims.”

  “So we’re finally down to business,” Mac says. “No more wine?” Angela shakes her head, so he pours what’s left into his cup, then drains it all in one swallow.

  “Remember that d
ay when you saw Mother and I out here? I said that I know of some matters we could talk about.”

  “As far as Bone Coulee is concerned, I want the place protected. I’m willing it to my grandson, with the provision that he keep it in its natural state.”

  Whether or not Angela would have confronted Mac with the question of her uncle’s death doesn’t come up, because before she can say anything four men climb out of an automobile at the top of the buffalo jump. One of them scans the coulee with binoculars. Another throws a rock down the jump, and three white-tailed deer break from cover and run up a narrow ravine on the west side. Angela gathers up the Styrofoam, and the empty bottle, along with the Tupperware and plastic wrap.

  “Maybe we should go.”

  “It’s just Pete and the rest of those fools,” Mac says. “I don’t think they’d recognize us from way up there.”

  “Binoculars?”

  “And so what if they do? I can just tell them to just mind their own business.”

  Angela takes out her sketch pad and starts drawing; four stick men all arms and legs upside down, like buffalo falling over the jump. Four heads split like pumpkins dropped on rocks. She flips the page and is about to start on another of a man wielding a fence post, but Mac’s voice draws her away.

  “Look up there,” he says. Jets of black smoke spout into the air. They hear the sound of a diesel engine. “I didn’t think they’d work on Sunday.”

  “I think we should go now,” Angela says. “I don’t like leaving Mother alone for too long, unless I have to.”

  “Here,” Mac says. “I’ll carry the basket.” He holds it open while Angela shakes the blanket.

  “And let’s not forget your shovel,” Angela says. “We left it by the trees.”

  When Angela gets home, her mother is waiting for her.

  “You didn’t ask about Thomas? You did nothing? You made all that fruit salad for nothing? Next time I will go on the picnic.” Roseanna wheels back and forth between her dresser and her suitcase on the bed.