Blaine goes inside and lies on the floor in the living room, stretches out and stares at the stippled ceiling. When he was a kid he used to lie on the floor and pretend the sparkles were stars. He looks over at the painting of his parents above the couch, with his father’s brand burned into the old-fashioned wooden frame. The painting, a copy of a photograph, had been Vicki’s idea for Blaine’s parents’ anniversary one year. The artist had suggested to Vicki that he do the painting in sepia to give it a western look and Vicki had liked that idea. When Blaine’s mother moved into her condo, she’d returned the painting to Blaine and Vicki. Now his parents—dressed in their Sunday clothes, Blaine’s mother with her hair newly curled—stare down at him and remind him of the abysmal job he’s done of looking after the place, how he’s lost most of it, and might as well give up the remaining quarter for all the good it’s doing to hang on to it. He wonders if the same thing will happen to the Torgeson kid. If it does, he hopes it happens quickly, before he’s got a wife and a bunch of kids to support. He remembers Vicki telling him that Lee won some kind of scholarship to go to university, and he turned it down to stay home and farm. That’s a decision the kid might live to regret.
Blaine closes his eyes and tries to imagine a life some-where else. In Swift Current maybe, working at the stockyards or the auction, living with Vicki and six kids in a rented house. But could he afford to keep his family in the city? And could they be happy there? The weight on Blaine’s body gets heavier and heavier and he doesn’t know if it’s sleep that’s coming on or death, and he doesn’t much care. With his luck, he thinks, it’ll be sleep, which it is, and he dozes off right there on the floor, stretched out on his back like a dead person, but still very much alive whether he likes it or not. He dreams of driving around in the sand dunes. In the dream, the truck skims lightly over the sand like a hydroplane over water. Vicki and the kids are in the truck box under a blanket, all but Shiloh, who is on the seat beside him. They have no possessions but a picnic basket, and they’re looking for water. In the dream, Blaine feels in his bones that they’re headed in the right direction. Shiloh sits attentively beside him, absorbing whatever it is that Blaine has to teach him about survival.
When Blaine wakes up, he looks around, half expecting Shiloh to be sitting on the couch staring at him. But the house is quiet, still no sign of Vicki and the kids. Blaine hauls himself up off the floor and calls Hank Trass’s number again. No answer. He decides to trailer his horse over to Hank’s just in case he’s needed.
When he’s halfway across the yard he can see that there’s a problem. The horse is lying down—not in itself unusual— but he’s stretched out all wrong, and when Blaine calls, he doesn’t lift his head to look. Blaine quickens his steps and as he enters the pen he can see that the horse is too exhausted to greet him.
“Hey, Buck. Hey, buddy,” Blaine says, an urgency in his voice. “Up now, buddy, on your feet.” The horse is wearing a halter and Blaine takes it and tugs, encourages with the toe of his boot. “Up now,” he says over and over, and the horse, willing to please, looks at Blaine and somehow manages to struggle to his feet. The evidence of his frantic kicking and thrashing shows in the patches of skin rubbed raw on his head and belly, and in the sweat marks on his neck and chest. Blaine suspects colic. It’s obvious that the horse has been in distress for some time. He places his ear against the horse’s belly, listening for gut sounds, and he hears nothing. There is no home remedy for this. There is no money for a vet bill. The horse must be in incredible pain and it breaks Blaine’s heart that he’s been suffering, probably all day. Blaine knows what he has to do. It’s not that he’s never had to put a horse down before, but this horse— the last one—now represents every ambition that he’s ever had and his last bit of hope, however unreasonable, that things might turn around. His dark heart, already close to bottom, sinks further, even as the anger rises. Anger at Vicki. If she’d been home, she would have noticed that something was wrong, or even if she hadn’t noticed, one of the kids would have.
Blaine goes to the house for a rifle, kept with several other rifles in a locked cabinet, and then to the bedroom where he keeps the shells hidden in a locked box on the top shelf of the closet. He slips the shells into his pocket and goes back to the pen, where the horse is once again down. Blaine gets him up on his feet and this time he leads him out of the pen. The exhausted horse rallies to follow Blaine on unsteady legs, toward the place on the quarter where the land dips and where, for a hundred years, the bones of the Dolsons’ animals have been bleached by the sun.
But Blaine can’t do it. Just as he is about to lead the horse through the wire gate, he decides he can’t, not yet, not without trying, who cares about the money; they’re already so far in debt it won’t make any difference. Maybe the vet can work a miracle and save the horse, save Blaine’s hope, his very life. He leads the horse away from the gate and toward the trailer, which is parked in the shade of the barn, leaves the horse standing, barely able to keep himself upright, while he backs the truck up to the coupling, and then he swings the trailer door open wide and asks the horse to get in. The quivering horse tries, gets one front leg up, and then the other, but he just doesn’t have the strength to lift his back legs. So Blaine lifts for him, lifts one back foot into the trailer and leans all his weight on the horse’s hip trying to get him to lift the other and step into the trailer— just one step so Blaine can close the trailer door. The horse leans against him and for a minute Blaine is sure that the horse is going to fall back on him and he shouts, “Get up there, get ahead,” and finally the horse takes the step up, one is enough, and Blaine quickly swings the door closed and latches it. He sees the gun where he left it leaning against the barn and decides to take it with him, in case there’s nothing the vet can do.
And of course there is nothing the vet can do. Just as Blaine is turning onto the service road in Swift Current, he hears a crash in the trailer and feels a sway. When he pulls into the clinic, the vet is outside in the yard and comes over to see what Blaine has for him.
“Not going to be good,” Blaine says as he’s unlatching the trailer door.
When Blaine has swung the door wide, the two of them stand looking at the dead horse. The vet shakes his head in a gesture of understanding.
“Sorry, Blaine,” he says.
“Colic,” Blaine says. “Had a hell of a time getting him in the trailer.”
“Probably couldn’t have saved him, that far gone,” the vet says. “Anyway, the surgery doesn’t always work. Lot of money for a gamble.”
He knows, Blaine thinks, everyone knows my financial situation.
“I would have spent the money,” Blaine says, “if there’d been a chance.”
The vet says, “I guess we’d better get him out before he’s wedged in. You don’t want that.”
And so Blaine’s last remaining horse doesn’t get to lie with the others on his last remaining quarter, and is instead dragged with chains around its hind legs to wait with a dead cow, flies already buzzing around its eyes, for sanitary disposal. The two large animals lie in a grassy area behind the clinic, well out of sight of the town families bringing their cats and dogs for rabies shots and neutering and euthanasia.
“No charge,” the vet says to Blaine. “The truck’s coming anyway for the cow,” and Blaine doesn’t argue.
He doesn’t go straight home. He decides to have another look around town for Vicki’s car. He drives up Main Street past the post office, turns and drives by the house where Justine lives, past the swimming pool just as Norval Birch’s daughter comes out and gets in her boyfriend’s truck—that god damned Norval Birch, the source of all his problems—a U-turn at the corner and back up Main Street and past the hotel, no sign of Vicki’s car in the parking lot. The schoolyard, Blaine thinks, the playground maybe, and on his way there he passes the United church and who is standing on the sidewalk looking up and down the street, stunned as a rabbit in the headlights, but Norval Birch himself. He’s ju
st standing there in a daze, and Blaine takes his foot off the gas and slows to watch as Norval turns and goes around the side of the church.
Blaine has no idea why he stops the truck. What can he say to Norval that he hasn’t said twenty times already in Norval’s office in the bank? But he does, he parks and opens his door to get out, and when he sees the gun leaning against the seat on the passenger’s side, he picks it up. He can’t say why. He’s hardly aware of it in his hand when he follows the sidewalk to the side door of the church. And when Norval hears footsteps coming down the stairs to the basement, he thinks it’s Joe the caretaker and goes to the foot of the stairs to meet him, and who does he see halfway down the narrow staircase but Blaine Dolson, with a rifle in his hand.
“Blaine,” says Norval, trying to sound nonchalant, trying not to look at the rifle; trying, in fact, to pretend that he’s just run into Blaine coming out of the Co-op, and it’s not a gun in his hand but rather a quart of milk or a loaf of bread. “Pretty hot day, wasn’t it,” he says. “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to go home and put my feet up.”
Blaine just stares at him, not moving up or down the stairs. Norval has never before been afraid of Blaine. He’s seen him angry, yes, but he’s never once feared that Blaine would cross the line and become a threat to his safety. Not Blaine Dolson.
“So what are you doing here?” Norval asks. “Myself, I’m waiting for Joe. He should be here. Not sure where he’s got to. The wife has it in her head that the church needs some upgrading—paint, flooring, that kind of thing. I don’t know. There are other more important needs, if you ask me. Take the windows upstairs. A strong wind could do some damage there.” He’s babbling, he knows it, but he’s unnerved by the gun. He, Norval, doesn’t own a gun. Never has. He wouldn’t know what to do with one. He’d barely known what to do with a water gun when he was a kid.
“Is that gun loaded?” he asks. He doesn’t like the sound of his own voice. He sounds weak and scared.
“No,” says Blaine.
“Can I help you with anything?” Norval asks.
“Coming from you, that’s a very funny question.”
Norval feels panic rising. He tries not to be afraid—it’s Blaine Dolson, he tells himself—but Blaine is still standing in the stairwell, hardly stirring, just staring down at Norval, and he has a gun and it might be for me. The seconds tick by. The stairwell is not especially well lit (another of Lila’s complaints) and Blaine’s face is in shadows, so it’s not hard for Norval to imagine menace in his eyes. Norval prays the gun is truly not loaded. He prays that Joe will show up.
He musters the courage to speak again. “What can I do for you, Blaine?” he asks. It’s a question he’s asked so many times in the comfort of his office chair, trying to sound upbeat and optimistic, trying to sound like an expert on finances and agro-business, but when he asks it here, in the musty church basement, away from his desk and whatever clout his promotion to bank manager has given him, he is shocked by how false it sounds. Just as false as Lila’s performance in her long-ago Shakespearean debut. He remembers the pain of sitting in the audience and hearing Lila’s struggle to infuse her lines with truth, and that’s just what he’s doing now, struggling to sound credible, as though there’s actually something he can do when he asks Blaine, What can I do for you? A man who has lost everything through no real fault of his own, he did everything that Norval advised. He remembers Blaine’s little girl howling in the hardware store, and he thinks, This man has mouths to feed, and he hears himself saying, “I’m sorry, Blaine. I’m sorry I asked that. There’s nothing I can do. Not a thing. It’s all bullshit.” And he feels himself sitting down on the bottom step of the narrow staircase, and he’s afraid—terrified—when he sees Blaine take a bullet out of his pocket and slip it into the gun’s chamber. Norval sits at the foot of the stairs in the bad light of the church basement with Blaine and his gun just a few steps away and thinks, Give it to me. Give me whatever I deserve.
Only Norval hasn’t seen Blaine reach for a bullet, he’s only imagined it, and Blaine doesn’t give him anything. He stares at Norval, and then he turns and leaves without saying another word, thereby dismissing him, and Norval thinks, Of course, of course. That’s what I deserve. Nothing. Exactly nothing.
The realization that he deserves nothing is such a relief.
That, and the fact that Blaine Dolson was able to see right through him, as if he were made of window glass.
Only a Breath
The Health Centre is located in a wing of the nursing home. Dr. van Riebeeck points the rest of the kids to the row of waiting room chairs, and then leads Vicki and Daisy into the treatment room. It’s after hours because the Centre closes at four o’clock, and Vicki is lucky she caught him. As she pulled into the parking lot, Daisy still screaming, she’d seen the doctor walking to his car and had driven right for him, honking the horn. The doctor froze and a look of fear crossed his face as though he thought Vicki might be about to run him down. When she saw this, she slammed on the brakes and Daisy was thrown forward into the dash, which made her scream even louder. Lucille started to cry too, because her ears hurt, she said, couldn’t Daisy be quiet now that they were here?
Vicki jumped out of the car, apologizing to the doctor but quite certain that something was really wrong with Daisy’s arm—even Daisy should have given up howling by this time. They all trooped into the Health Centre after the doctor unlocked the door and switched the lights back on.
“Now you lot behave yourselves,” Vicki had said to the rest of the kids when they got inside. “We don’t need any more excitement.”
From the open doorway to the treatment room, Vicki keeps her eye on her brood and on Daisy at the same time. She watches as Martin seats himself in a wheelchair waiting by the receptionist’s desk, and then all of a sudden the chair is rolling across the vinyl flooring, and then all the kids get into the picture and they and the chair disappear from view. Luckily, the doctor’s back is to the door.
“I think you’re going to have to take this girl into Swift Current,” the doctor says in his South African accent while Daisy cries and holds her arm away so that he can’t get a good look at it. “Here, little girl,” he says, reaching out his hand as though he were offering it to a dog to sniff.
“Daisy,” Vicki says, tired of the racket and the whole complicated day. “For heaven’s sake, let the nice doctor look so we can get you fixed up and go home.” To the doctor she says, “Please do what you can here. I can’t take all these kids into Swift Current now. I just can’t.” She knows she sounds like she’s begging, but she doesn’t care.
Daisy stops crying for a few seconds and retreats to a far corner of the room. The doctor turns to Vicki. “Why don’t you wait with the other children,” he says. “Perhaps she’ll be better if you aren’t in the room. That sometimes helps with the difficult ones.”
Vicki wants to tell him that Daisy is not a difficult child, but then she looks at her daughter cowering in the corner like a wolf pup. She leaves the room, closing the door after her, and listens for the crying to start up again, but it doesn’t.
The waiting area is deserted. Vicki can’t see the other kids anywhere. She steps out into the parking lot, thinking they may have taken the wheelchair outside, but they aren’t there either. They must be in the nursing home, then, visiting Mr. Cruikshank, a Second World War veteran who has a major league baseball he likes to show the kids. She knows Martin and some other boys from school sometimes visit him during the noon hour. After Mr. Cruikshank has had his lunch, Martin tells her, he takes them back to his room and asks one of them to go to the drawer and get his baseball, which is in a red satin bag made especially for the ball by his daughter. Apparently he caught it at a game in Ebbets Field in Brooklyn in 1947, after the war and before he returned home to Saskatchewan. He can’t remember the name of the player who hit the ball, someone who got sent back to the minors and disappeared from baseball history.
Vicki walks
around the corner to the nursing home entrance, passes through the lounge with its big-screen TV, and goes down the short hallway that she knows leads to Mr. Cruikshank’s room. She’s familiar with the building, having visited elderly neighbours here many times. The hallways and public spaces in the home are decorated cheerily with wicker baskets and dried flowers and little brass pots that look as if they belong in an English country garden. The bedrooms are jam-packed with odd, mismatched furniture from the last places the residents called home, the places they left in a flurry of dispersal, saving only the few favourite items that would fit in one small room: an armchair, a dresser, a small television set. There are crocheted afghans and home-made quilts with matching pillow slips, and almost all of the residents have brought with them a picture to hang on the wall above the bed or the armchair: a generic oil painting of maple trees in the fall; a calendar print of a lone cowboy; or perhaps a paint-by-number completed years ago by a member of the family. And photographs. Every surface in every bedroom is covered with framed photographs of ancestors and descendants, babies and children, teenagers in graduation caps and gowns, family portraits. Reminders of the past, and reminders that the world is still happening out there.
As Vicki approaches Mr. Cruikshank’s open doorway, she can hear him telling the story of how he caught the ball in his army cap, and how he wishes he’d stood in line to get some of the players to sign it but he didn’t, there you go, too late now. She peeks around the corner and her children are all listening to Mr. Cruikshank’s story, calm as can be. Lucille is sucking her thumb, leaning up against her big brother Martin on the floor. The twins are both seated on the edge of the bed. She can’t see the wheelchair; they must have ditched it somewhere.
Vicki hears Martin ask, “What should I be surprised about? You said I would be surprised.”
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