Starlight

by Richard Wagamese

  She could hear her biting and chewing and she brushed her hand across her brow to sweep away the tiredness. The fuel tank was less than a quarter full.

  “Do you remember how to siphon?”

  “Un-huh.”

  “We’re gonna pull over near a farmhouse and I want you to take the gas can in the back and siphon us off some gas.”

  “All right.” She said it dully, disinterestedly, like she’d asked her to take out the trash.

  Cadotte had taught her that. He’d taught Winnie to steal chickens, eggs, fruit, vegetables. He taught her to swipe hubcaps, anything metal, and copper wire from cables. Anything that could be turned to cash. Asking her to do this for them caused Emmy a well of shame. She grinned at the girl, more as a means of quelling her sorrow than offering her courage in the theft.

  They rounded a curve in the road and she saw the darkened silhouette of a rural place. There was no barn. But there was a truck. She eased to the side of the road and the girl jumped out and she could hear her rustle the jerry can out of the box. She got out of the truck and stood beside her. There was no dog. It would have barked by now. Instead, they could hear crickets in the fields and the whine of mosquitoes around their faces and the soft lowing of cattle. She touched the girl’s shoulder and they moved forward together. They walked in the low culvert at the side of the driveway where the grass would soften their footfalls. Nothing moved. When they got to the yard she motioned the girl toward the truck and pointed to herself and then the house. Winnie nodded and scuttled off toward the truck parked a dozen yards from the house. Emmy crept toward the porch that appeared to encircle the building. She could feel her heart hammering in her chest against her shallow breath. Nothing stirred. She slide-stepped to a window and cupped her hands and peered through the glass. When she identified the way to the kitchen she moved along the porch to the back door that led out from it. She waited. When there was still no sound she tried the doorknob. It was locked. She could see the girl trundling the jerry can away from the truck and down the culvert. When she was sure she was away she bunched her skirt up around her fist and punched through one of the small panes of glass. It shattered easily. The sound of breaking glass was muted by the cloth but she could hear the crack of it echo off the shed behind her. She stepped to the side with her back pressed to the wall but there was no sound at all from within the house so she went back to the door and reached her hand through the broken pane and found the doorknob and stepped through into the kitchen. It was large and spacious and the floors were wood. It was a humble kitchen but clean and well tended. The cupboards reached high above the wide varnished counters and there was an old iron stove and a refrigerator of the same vintage. The sink was spacious and enamelled, and there was a pantry just off to the side. She crept to it. The shelves were filled from floor to ceiling and confident now that there was no one home she pulled on the chain she felt against her cheek and smiled.

  There were cloth bags hung on a nail beside the door and she filled them quickly with things they could eat on the road. Jams and preserves and cookies and nuts and dried fruit. She took another bag and walked to the refrigerator. She filled the second bag with cheese, milk, carrots, some hard-boiled eggs left on a saucer, and several stalks of celery. On the counter she found a cake pan. She lifted the lid to find a chocolate cake and she dug her fingers into it and ate leaning against the counter. When she saw the girl step onto the porch she waved her in and they both attacked the cake, chasing it with gulps of milk. When they were finished she wiped her hands and face with a dish towel and motioned for the girl to grab one of the bags. She opened a few drawers.

  “What’re ya doin’?” Winnie whispered.

  “We ain’t proper thieves,” she said in a low voice. “I’m gonna leave a note and say thanks.”

  She looked at her in an odd way. “Why?”

  “They’re just like us is why.”

  She nodded and walked out the door onto the porch with the bag in her hand.

  Emmy found the nub of a pencil and a brown paper bag and scribbled a note.

  “We’re sorry for the damage. We was just hungry is all and all’s we took was some food. Sorry.”

  She thought about signing her name but thought about Cadotte maybe making it here and decided against it. She left the note against the lid of the cake pan. She picked up the remaining bag and walked out onto the porch and put her free hand between the girl’s shoulder blades, and they walked casually down the driveway to the truck. The girl put her feet up on the dashboard and she started the truck and eased back out onto the road. She could hear her munching carrots in the dark.

  STARLIGHT WIPED A HAND ACROSS THE GLASS and the condensation peeled away from the window like the skin of turned fruit. He stared out across the dank yard and he could see them walking through the field toward the barn, the clank of the cow bells dulled by the fog they moved though. They were like wraiths in the faint light. The rain had kept up overnight. When he pulled on his clothes they were still damp. They’d worked late into the evening and he’d been too tired to hang them properly. He dressed slowly. The cold wet of the clothing made him shiver and he clasped his arms about himself and crow-hopped lightly to warm himself. The room was cold and the floorboards slapped icily at his feet. He pulled on his socks and an old wool sweater he kept on a hook on the back of the door for mornings like this. The house was quiet and he stole down the stairs and into the living room.

  Roth was sitting on a straight-backed chair in the dark, watching the fire he’d stoked work itself higher, and the soft burn of flame threw everything into shadow behind him. “Colder’n damper than a witch’s wazoo out there, Frank.”

  “Ground’ll break easy then,” Starlight said.

  “We dug that trench all day yesterday. It never broke easy.”

  “Might now.”

  Roth eased himself up from the chair and walked into the kitchen and returned with two cups of coffee. “Gotta thank old lady Gramm for makin’ up our lunches. But if I get mock chicken again I swear I’ll scream.”

  “Better’n that headcheese we tried last week.”

  “That there is a fact,” Roth said.

  “Who the hell ever thoughta eating something like that?”

  “Some poor slob in a ditch, I reckon. It’s the kinda thoughts that come to a man waist-deep in muck.”

  “That what you think about?”

  Roth laughed. In the dim light he could see the toothless gaps. “Not even. Me, I’m thinkin’ of women and good, warm whisky and even better lovin’. What about you?”

  He shrugged. He disliked this kind of talk. It didn’t lead anywhere and he had no voice for things that held no consequence. “Horses, I guess,” he said. “And the smell of the land after a rain like this.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re gonna get a snoot full of the smell of land today. You know they got backhoes for this kinda shit?”

  “I always figured a man gets more satisfaction outta workin’ with his back.”

  “Yeah well, you and me got a whole different idea of satisfaction apparently.”

  “You been with me long enough you oughta know how I work.”

  “That I do, chum. You also know that they got furnaces that’d heat this place better’n that fireplace, don’tcha?”

  “Fire’s good for the spirit.”

  “Warm’s better.”

  “We’d best head out and get them cows milked.”

  Roth shook his head sadly. “See, the thing with you is, you flat out refuse to look progress in the eye. Not that I don’t mind squeezin’ a tit now and then, and I do enjoy a cold glass of milk on occasion, but dang it, Frank, how come we gotta milk by hand still?”

  “Progress is just a lazy man’s word for easy. You get to feel the work this way. Way it was meant to be.”

  “Is that a fact? Well, why don’t you run with them wolves and then sit and paint ’em insteada usin’ that camera? Seems to me paintin’ and drawin’ is how it was meant to
be.”

  Starlight grinned as he raised the cup. He enjoyed this repartee. Eugene Roth had been with him three years and had eclipsed the definition of hired hand long ago. He was a friend now, and a good one, and Starlight couldn’t see working the farm without him. “That’s a point,” he said. “Except I got no hand for art.”

  “You got an eye for it though. Those are some plumb amazing shots you come back with. How the hell you do that anyhow? Get the critters to pose like that?”

  “They don’t pose. They just let me see them in their true nature.”

  “Yeah. But how?”

  Starlight sat back in the rocker and let his legs stretch out in front of him. He sipped at the coffee and nodded as the flames broke out in a wide fan of orange and the heat of the blaze pressed against his chest. He reached a hand out to his left and ran it along the edge of the old man’s saddle. “The land makes ya equal,” he said finally. “Spend time out there alone like I done all my life, it talks to ya, let’s ya in on secrets most people never get.”

  “Good thing I know ya, pal. Folks hear a man talkin’ about hearing voices in the wilderness they label that man looney tunes.”

  “It don’t talk in words, Eugene. It talks in feelings.”

  “See? Now that there’ll get ya a standing reservation in a rubber room.”

  Starlight laughed. “Not as crazy as it sounds. You learn how to listen proper out there is all.”

  “Maybe I never learned to trust it like you do, Frank. That’s why I don’t venture out alone on it.”

  “Maybe ya should sometime.”

  “I can hunt down a deer and snare a rabbit, sure. But what you do? Disappearin’ alone for days or just on a jaunt in the dark? That ain’t got a drop of me in it.”

  “It might.”

  “Maybe. But what I hanker for sits a lot easier in my mind.”

  “I know. I know. Warm women, warm whisky, hard country music.”

  “Now that there is a workin’ definition for livin’.”

  “Well, we work hard enough you might turn that into true.”

  “Which reminds me,” Roth said. “They pay you a lot for them pictures. Why’n’t ya just call it a game and do that for a living insteada bustin’ your hump the way it was meant to be? Or at least buy a dang milkin’ machine! And a friggin’ backhoe.”

  “We best get to it so we can hit that trench.”

  “Awful anxious for discomfort, ain’t ya?” Roth asked.

  “Just how I am.”

  “Never knew no fuckin’ keener for muck’n mud before. Sits kinda strange in my whattaya call it? Sensibilities.”

  “How I was raised.”

  “Sorry for ya,” Roth said.

  They rose and walked through the kitchen to the mudroom and pulled on their boots and slickers and then stepped out the door onto the porch and stood watching the rain and eyeing the gauzy hump of mountain through the fog. The trench they’d been digging cross the yard was four feet deep and under a yard across. They’d dug twenty yards of it.

  “Coulda backhoed the whole shebang and saved us the slavin’,” Roth said. “There’s professionals for septic fields and tanks anyhow.”

  “We’re as professional as it gets.”

  “Ain’t no frickin’ honour in diggin’, Frank. I feel like a gol’ damned badger or something.”

  “Damn good diggers them badgers.”

  “Varmints is what they are.”

  “Once we’re done the chores we’ll get at it. I’ll bust up.” He looked at Roth. The skinny man just scratched his head. “You follow with the barrow and shovel.”

  “Leaves me with two jobs. Loadin’ and sloggin’.”

  “Choose then.”

  Roth rubbed at his jaw. “One’s as bad as the other, I guess. You’re a mind for it, we’ll switch when we get to diggin’ out that old tank.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Yell if I’m too fast for ya.”

  “That’ll be the damn day.”

  * * *

  —

  He stepped into the wall of earth and swung the pick. It bit into the hard pack and there was a cascade of stones and earth before he yanked the tong back and debris bellied onto the board at his feet with a clatter like shot in a pail. He kicked the dirt back with one foot after each swing. The glint of the pick in the dimness was like the sweep hand of a clock and it drove him to work faster. His muscles loosened. He felt his heat rise and there were beads of sweat at his eyes he cleared with the back of a wrist before plowing the head of the pick deeper into the dirt. He could hear Roth behind him muttering and cursing, the scrape of the shovel on the boards as he loaded the barrow for another trudge to the end of the trench at the house where they would carry it off with a tractor. He made four yards in just over an hour and he was bristling with the effort and the feel of the work in his arms and shoulders.

  “Christ, Frank, give it a rest, will ya? I need a friggin’ smoke,” Roth said.

  He set the pick down. They turned the wheelbarrow over on its rim and sat and he twisted a smoke for each of them. The light had grown to a shroud-like grey.

  “I remember how hard it was to talk the old man into puttin’ in septic in the first place. Used to live with just the outhouse. I come to like the indoor washroom.”

  “You mean progress?” Roth closed one eye against the rising smoke and stared at him.

  Starlight grinned. “Yeah. Okay. Progress.”

  “Dang. He said the word. Might be there’s machines in our future after all.”

  “I wouldn’t bet your wages on it.”

  “Don’t know, pal. You let one bit of progress in, the rest’ll come in after it. Why you so deadset against allowin’ modern times in anyhow?”

  Starlight stood and ground the butt out with the toe of his boot and let the last lungful of smoke trail out of him. Roth stood and they turned the barrow back on its wheels. “Keeping the old place like the old place just sits right in my head. Tradition kinda. Like the old man woulda wanted it kept.”

  Starlight looked ahead of them at the end of the digging. He could see the slick, bald head of stones clumped into the press of the dirt and he swung the pick and began again. Roth broke into his mutter and they were both soon lost in the mechanical rhythm of the dig.

  THEY SLEPT IN THE TRUCK. Emmy pulled into a rest area in the middle of the afternoon and they lay their heads back against the door frames and were asleep almost instantly. The patter of rain on the roof woke them. The girl rubbed her eyes with a knuckle and reached for the sack of food at her feet. She rummaged around and found a carrot and gnawed on it and looked at her mother out of the corner of her eye.

  “You hungry, Ma?”

  “Not yet. I got a powerful thirst, though.”

  “I could run over to that crick and bring you some water.”

  “All right. I just need to sit a while.”

  The girl clambered out of the truck and she watched her cross to the creek that ran along the back of the playground. She seemed so small. Emmy felt a lump grow at her throat and the sting of tears in her eyes and she shook her head to clear them. It wasn’t good for Winnie to see her cry. As desperate as things were she needed to show her nothing but strength, endurance, game. She needed to act as though Cadotte were alive and intent on finding her. Winnie. If he found her he’d find Winnie, and when she considered his meanness, his darkness, she felt the hot bile of anger in her belly. She banged the steering wheel with a fist.

  “Ma?” Winnie said from outside her door.

  She rolled the window down and took the plastic cup the girl offered and drank, and the sleeted relief of the water enlivened her. She got out of the truck and stretched and tousled the girl’s hair. The rain was a joyful spray and she raised her face to it and let it hit her square and the girl followed suit. They stood there together. Winnie laughed. She motioned to the truck and they settled themselves and she started it. There was a rumpled roadmap in the glovebox and she reached across the girl’s l
ap and got it. She unfolded it and Winnie slid across the seat to look at it too. She pointed to where she thought they were and where they had come from.

  “You think we got far enough away?” Winnie asked.

  “I don’t know. I think we should push on more.”

  “There doesn’t look to be much around here.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping for.”

  “Whattaya mean?”

  “I mean, I think Jeff would think we’d head for a big place. Like Vancouver maybe or Calgary. Someplace someone could get lost in.”

  “I got lost in the bush once. Remember?”

  “I do. And that’s where we’re headed. Somewhere where there’s nothing but miles and miles of land around us.”

  “Like where?”

  “We’ll know when we see it.”

  “I better keep my eyes peeled then.”

  She smiled. “I guess you better.”

  She put the truck in gear and they rolled out onto the highway. The gas tank showed half empty. She clenched her teeth and drove while the girl sat up on her knees, staring out the side window at the land flashing by them. According to the map she figured they had enough fuel to reach just beyond Williams Lake. She hoped so. When they ran out she’d have to figure out how to continue. She heaved a deep breath and set her mind to that. Necessity. She would do what necessity asked her to do and she wouldn’t allow anything to prevent her from keeping her girl safe. Knowing that, she leaned back in her seat and drove relentlessly.

  * * *

  —

  They drove through Williams Lake. They made another thirty miles and the gas situation became critical. It was early evening and they’d driven past the rain. Now the world was cloaked in grey and she was hungry. The girl had snacked on the food in the sack and Emmy was content to allow her to eat. Now, she felt the need for food herself. But she would resist until she found the resources or the opportunity to get them more. She saw a woman working a horse in a round pen in the front field of a small acreage and she pulled over to the side of the road.