Pop chuckled, reached down, and tugged the cap brim over Lonny’s eyes. “Let’s go home now,” he said, “and see that mother of yours. If we stay away too long, we might make her mad at us men.”
“So, my babe,” she said when he and Pop scuffed up the porch steps, knocking mud off their boots, “how was that? Did you like it? Come here.” She pulled him onto her lap, tickling his ear.
“It was like that time I saw the light on the trees!” he told her excitedly. “That’s just how it felt!”
One day, back in the city, she’d told him that if you settled down and were very quiet, you could see light come right out and dance on the branches after the long, hard winter. “Mmm-hmm, really, I wouldn’t lie to you. See that tree, now?” She pointed out past the little south-facing window of their tiny apartment. “Sit down and stare real hard at it.”
He sat down on the floor with his hands in his lap, just like they did on Sesame Street, and then he stared hard at the tree. His eyes made big tears from concentration, and just when he was ready to give up, she said, “Keep looking,” from the sofa where she sat folding socks and little shirts. He kept looking, to please her. And then the bare limbs of that spring tree did begin to shimmer with dancing light! With points and beads and ripples of pale gold that slowly bleached out and filled his eyes.
A year after she married Pop, his mom, glowing and big and beautiful, went into the hospital to give birth to his baby sister. She came home empty-armed and sad. The light went out around her. He was eight years old and had never before been to a funeral.
He crept into Pop’s arms. It was a cold spring day. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” Pop said over and over again. “We’ll be all right. Things will be okay again.”
And, after a while, they were. Wild, blond ex-hippie Deena came into their yard. She appeared, a month later, in June, on a chestnut red horse. She slipped off the animal’s back, extended her tanned hand to Lonny’s mom, and said, “I’m Deena. I live down the road. It’s time we met.”
“Deena.” Pop, coming up from the barn, looked at her in stunned surprise. “Thought you ran off to Calgary.”
She flushed, and Lonny thought she was beautiful. “Been back over a month,” she said. “Couldn’t stay in the city a minute longer. Got restless again. Discovered I couldn’t breathe. So I guess this is going to be my home after all.”
“That’s good,” said Pop, and a little current, like the flutter of invisible wings, flew between them, then vanished.
A big freckly grin now covered Deena’s face. “Didn’t you hear? My uncle died and left me a pile of money. I just bought the old café in town. And who might you be?” She tucked her strong, lemony, horsey-smelling fingers under Lonny’s chin. Then she turned her eyes back to Lonny’s mom. “I don’t suppose there’s a person in this community who hasn’t heard about your loss. I hear a good eighty percent turned up for the funeral. That’s some outpouring of love. But I sure am sorry for what you must be going through.” Her boots were the same shiny color as her horse, who now arched its neck and nudged her shoulder.
Lonny’s mom turned her face away. He and Pop stood looking at her, caught in their desperate hope for some happy response. In that instant he knew two things: that they both loved her beyond measure, and that their lives were spun together out of the silk of her very breath.
She turned back and, reaching out, took Deena’s hand. She urged her shyly toward the house. “Come inside,” she said. “I’ll make us some tea.”
His mom changed after that. She seemed a different person. She was more demanding, less willing to stick around the farm and just be with Lonny and Pop. But she wasn’t crying anymore, and that was a big plus.
“Deena’s coming over,” she’d say. “We’re all going into town now. She’s wallpapering her restaurant today. Tom, where’s that paste you’ve been holding on to? We don’t need it anymore.”
And at the grand opening of Deena’s Deli, Deena made a big speech about finding friends in places where you’d hardly expect they’d be.
That night, the night of the opening, Lonny overheard Pop say softly to his mom, “Deena and I had a little something going. That was a long time ago. Before you came along and stole my heart.”
His mom, in the shocking quiet of their kitchen, said, “I knew that.”
“You knew? She told you?”
“She didn’t have to. It took courage for her to come and be my friend.”
And so, life went on like that for quite a while. A little sister never got to be part of their family. The plans that had been made around her arrival—the freshly painted wicker bassinet that had held generations of LaFrenière babies, the little blue room off Mom and Pop’s bedroom, the talk of a family of four—were replaced by Deena, what she was doing, what she thought about this and that. She was included in family horseback rides in the summer and skating at the rink in town in the winter. And as Lonny grew and took the rural bus to school and started making friends of his own, he didn’t think too much more about that heightened time, about the strange and sad and brave world of grown-ups.
A week after Earl McKay moved onto the old LaFrenière land, Lonny woke up in his room, his chest heaving with tears. His sobs were so awful and uncontrollable, he was afraid he would wake up Pop.
He had been dreaming of his mother. She had appeared to him as a vision in a shiny white dress decorated with beads the color of the sunrise and long, soft feathery fringe. She had never worn such a dress when she was alive. She came and sat on his bed, crossed her legs, thoughtfully jigged one foot up and down. “Lonny, my babe,” she said at last in a sad and disappointed voice, “how come you did that? It’s a sacred place.”
He wanted her to tell him that she loved him, to turn and to cling to her, to keep her close inside his heart. But she just put her hands on her knees and shook her head. “You were supposed to take care of it, not dig it up. Why couldn’t you leave those poor souls in peace?” And then she got up and left through his bedroom door.
Robert Lang was the only person who shared his guilty secret. And it had all started so innocently. A badger kicked something out of its den on Medicine Bluff.
It was the year he turned eleven. He and Robert, a couple of raunchy kids, had gone up there, their packs full of sandwiches and cookies and soft drinks and some contraband magazines belonging to Robert’s older brother, Danny. It was a sizzling hot July afternoon, and Medicine Bluff was their favorite place to be.
Near the top of the slope they saw something bony lying just outside the opening of the badger’s den. Lonny reached down and rolled it over. Faceup. It was a small human skull. Its toothless jaws, its round vacant eyes, stared up at him. This was not the skull of a great chief or medicine man. It was not much bigger than his hand. So much for Pop’s theory. He turned to say something to Robert, and he was gone, already at the bottom of the hill and still running. But twenty minutes later, back at home, Robert took the tiny skull out of Lonny’s hands.
“Look!” he said, rolling it over to show Pop how the base of the skull had been crushed.
“Wasn’t done in by badgers,” Pop said, staring hard through his grease-speckled glasses. “Stone war mallet, probably.”
He sat on an old stool in the shed, cleaning motor parts, wiping them down with a rag, his big bony hands covered with black grease.
“You told me a great chief was buried there, Pop,” said Lonny, feeling cheated.
“Probably more than one person buried up there. We’ll never know for sure.” Pop looked straight into Lonny’s eyes. “We have to leave them be, son.”
A westerly breeze blew through the open door and windows, and Lonny’s mom appeared, leaning against the doorway. “What’s up?” Her cool slim fingers reached to tuck his hair behind his ears.
“Look what we found!” Robert turned proudly with their prize still cupped in his hands. Her eyes widened.
“We found it on Medicine Bluff,” Lonny told her. “A badger dug it up.”
&nbs
p; “Bury it,” she said, turning away. “Go back there, and bury it.”
“Can’t we keep it awhile?” Lonny pleaded.
Pop bent again over his work. “Do what your mother says. Even badgers have no business disturbing the dead.”
“He was just being a badger.” Lonny pouted.
“Spade’s over there in the corner,” said Pop.
So he and Robert took the spade and the skull, reluctantly got on their bikes, and wheeled back to Medicine Bluff.
“Stupid badger,” said Lonny, pressing his foot on the blade, digging deep into the rich dark heart of the hill. The smell of sage and bergamot rose up from the loamy upturned soil. The badger was either not at home or had moved somewhere else. Lonny kept on digging.
Robert stood beside him, arms folded. “Are you going to just keep doing that? How much more are you going to dig?”
“Shut up,” said Lonny. “Don’t ask dumb questions.”
“I want to dig, too. I want to find out what’s in there.”
“Then take the damn shovel. Here.”
They took turns digging. They unearthed what might have been the remains of a child: a leg bone, a small rib, a tiny skeletal hand. By then, neither of them was brave enough to stop. Only a couple of feet beneath the surface of the mound, they began to unearth a complete skeleton, a big one. It was buried in a crouching position. They dug with the shovel. They dug with their hands. They found a shell necklace, a portion of a clay pot, a perfect pale arrowhead mixed in with the bones of the skeleton’s ribs. They dug with a queer and giddy energy until Lonny shot up from the mound and sat on the edge of it, grabbing mouthfuls of air.
He prayed for the sun to vaporize the feelings that were creeping in around him. Down the hill the poplar leaves shook like tongues in the wind.
Robert came up from the mound, too, gasping. His freckles stood out like startled dots against his white skin. “I feel sick,” he said, weaving back down one side of the hill.
When Robert returned, Lonny quickly swiped tears from his eyes with the backs of his hands.
“I didn’t think it’d be like this,” Robert said.
“Liar,” said Lonny. “What’d you think we’d find— a couple of arrowheads?”
“Why didn’t you stop?”
“Why didn’t you stop?”
They put everything back as best they could. They even patted back the clumps of prairie grass and flowers, the blazing star, the bergamot, the scented sage, so that all would appear as normal as possible. Then they got on their bikes and rode off the property. Behind them the bruised spirits rose and shook themselves from a long uneasy sleep.
Two nights later his mother died. She just crumpled in front of his stepfather at a dance. He hadn’t been there to see it but could still play it over in his imagination: his mother sauntering up, smiling with all of her heart in her eyes. His stepfather reaching out to hold her in his awkward but tender way, and then his own smile suddenly dying as she slipped down his body to the dance floor.
In rational waking moments, he understood that it was her weak heart that killed her, a birth defect no one before had detected. But swimming breathless just below the surface was the voice he couldn’t shake, the one telling him that her death and their bad luck and the unearthing of those ancient skeletons were all entwined.
4
Earl McKay sat at the kitchen table with Pop. It was the first Sunday in January, and Earl hadn’t drawn a sober breath since just before Christmas. He’d staggered on snowshoes through a blizzard and pulled a hip flask from his jacket pocket. He proceeded to add “a little juice” to two stained coffee mugs. His hand shook as he poured the whiskey.
Lonny turned away. He took off his glasses and tossed them on top of the refrigerator. He went to the kitchen sink, where he loudly ran the tap and vigorously scraped caked-on eggs and crud off a black frying pan.
“I just wrote a letter to my daughter,” said Earl. “It was her birthday a couple of weeks back. Time for a little celebration.”
Even with his back to Earl, Lonny could hear the pleading tone of a weak man. A man who was the total opposite of Pop LaFrenière.
Pop was polite. Sometimes his politeness to people who didn’t deserve it drove Lonny crazy. He watched him get up from the table, go over to the stove, come back with the fresh pot of coffee.
“I didn’t know you had a daughter, Earl,” he said, pouring coffee into their whiskey.
“She’s just turned seventeen years old, and that’s about how long it’s been since I’ve seen her.”
Lucky for her, thought Lonny. He ran hot sudsy water into the sink.
“Well, well,” said Pop sympathetically. “That is too bad. Children are a comfort.” After a long pause, he added, “I don’t know what I would have done after my Margaret died if it hadn’t been for Lonny here.”
Behind the clattering of dishes, the two men fell silent. Lonny felt an old pain rise in his heart. For Pop. For himself. For the woman they had both loved. Here he was, almost eighteen years old, and still, even in his waking life, the damn tears could come. They rolled from his eyes and fell through soap clouds into the dishwater.
When he was very small, before Pop, there had just been the two of them. Mom and him. Now there was just two again. Pop and him. Funny how life works out.
He often had memories about the small apartment back in Winnipeg. Now he realized that his mother hadn’t been much more than a teenager. She chainsmoked back then. He remembered her thick silky hair pulled into a high ponytail. Standing on her lap, in his bare feet, the smoke from her cigarette curling up from the ashtray behind them, he’d put his hands on her cheeks, smoothing them, smoothing her hair, then reach his arms around and hug her. He could clearly remember her smell. She always smelled of cigarettes. Cigarettes and shampoo. And she always hugged him back, fiercely.
He also remembered the first time he saw Pop. He stood like a large bear in the doorway of their apartment. Then he took them out to McDonald’s. He bought Lonny those little cookies. Two boxes. One for now. The other for later.
His mother had answered a personal ad in the newspaper. Widowed farmer, no children, looking for companionship. Possible relationship. Children welcome. The rest, as they say, was history.
Before Earl left, he pulled the letter to his daughter out of his pocket and placed it with drunken grace on the table. “Going back up to my little place now. Don’t worry about me. Storm’s subsided from the look of it. But would one of you mind dropping this off in the mail when you’re in town?”
“Lonny will be glad to do it,” offered Pop. “You’ll do that for Earl, won’t you, son.”
“Yes,” he said, noting that it didn’t have a stamp. He would have to make a special trip from the high school to the post office downtown. On his lunch break. Most of which would be taken up with jazz band practice. Playing the four-hundred-dollar guitar that had been his extraordinary seventeenth-birthday present from his perpetually broke stepfather. Never mind, he’d buy the goddamn stamp.
“I’d be grateful,” said Earl, looking up at him with watery weary eyes.
Earl went out the door, tied on his snowshoes, and, whistling tunelessly, staggered off into the snowy hills again.
On Monday, Lonny meant to mail the letter, but band practice went overtime. And Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday he went right from school to his job, at Petro-Can. Friday, Pop came around to the school at lunchtime to say that Earl had caught a really bad virus, and he’d just had to admit him to the Valley View Health Centre. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, Earl continued to get worse. Tuesday, something went wrong with his heart. Wednesday, he developed pneumonia, and then things truly went from bad to worse. The following Monday he died.
Lonny still had the letter in the inside pocket of his jacket. He pulled it out frequently to look at it. He liked her name: Alexandra Marie Sinclair. He liked the way it sounded. What could Earl possibly find to say to a daughter he’d never taken care of, never
even met? He couldn’t send it now. But he couldn’t just throw it away either. Finally, he put Earl McKay’s last letter to his daughter into the drawer beside his bed. And that was that.
5
When Alex’s Cree grandfather was a young man, he came back, disillusioned, fearful, and a little bit crazy, from World War II. “My reaction to that,” he told her once, “was to go way far up north. Lose myself in the bush. Had a trapline there. Trapped mostly white arctic fox, some beaver, the occasional lynx. That first winter I remember months and months of snow that cleaned out my spirit. I remember drinking tea made from boiled snow water. And smoking kinnikinnik with a man who told me to pay close attention to my dreams. They would tell me things, he said, that would be important to my life. So then I stayed up north. I stayed for nineteen years. I was a lonely man back in that time. Sad in my heart. And then, finally, my dreams led me to your grandmother.”
The night before the letter arrived, the stranger’s letter, she had a vivid, confusing dream.
Down a hill, by a lake, she watches Grandpa fishing. Talking to himself, his voice rising and falling, a soft drone. He casts off a perfect line that catches the sun and wind in midair, like spider silk. She follows the line over the lake. She tumbles with it as the air cools, then suddenly freezes into winter. And then she is tracking her father through the sloping light of January. He wears Grandpa’s old bear-paw showshoes that move swiftly over the crusted snow. She wades through the tracks because her bare feet will not hold her on the surface. The snow sings around her: Vanished, vanished, vanished.
She woke up suddenly, feeling empty and cold, and turned her face on her pillow to look at the glowing frost patterns on the window. What had she been dreaming? Yes, she remembered! She saw Grandpa clearly, just as if it were only yesterday and not one entire long year since he had died and disappeared from this planet.
Strangely, too, there was her father. And why would he be there? But then it wasn’t exactly a dream about him. It was a dream about his absence.
Bone Dance Page 2