Starlight

by Richard Wagamese

  “That’s a lot to figure when you’re scared shit.”

  “Takin’ up with her, Anderson?”

  “Fuck no. I’m still tryin’ to scope out if there’s wrinkles we ain’t thought of. Tryin’ to see how much thinkin’ she done. Like maybe we’d be so grateful we didn’t roast we’d let her skate.”

  “Skate nothin’. She’s gettin’ what she’s gettin’.”

  “And the kid?”

  Cadotte put his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Anderson drank and watched him think. He set the bottle on the floor and the thunk of it echoed dully off the bare walls. Cadotte swung his legs off the bed and sat up, fixing Anderson with a hard, blank stare.

  “No breaks. No mercy. It’s a one-hole job,” he said.

  THEY WERE WHITEWASHING THE FENCE around the main yard. It was a warm morning and they’d both stripped off to their undershirts. Roth dangled a smoke from his lips and drew on it while he worked. Starlight moved intently and the slap of the wide brush on the wide planks left no splatter on the grass at his feet. They were quick and efficient and the job had been going well since the dew had burned off. They heard the scrunch of gravel and the ping of small stones against the undercarriage and the wheels of the vehicle before it turned slowly into the expanse of the yard. They kept working.

  “Morning, Frank. Eugene.”

  “Morning, Maddie.” Starlight hadn’t even looked up.

  “How’d you know it was me?” she asked.

  “Car sounds different than a truck. Truck’ll throw more echo offa the barn.”

  “Coulda been any car.”

  “Coulda,” he said. “Wasn’t.”

  “Truth is we don’t get much traffic, Maddie,” Roth said. “Process of elimination ain’t a tough call out here.”

  “Well, you two are a constant source of surprise for me.”

  “Farmers is all,” Roth said. “Get good ears after a time. Nose and eyes too.”

  She smiled. They stood in front of her like a pair of kids waiting direction. They looked so innocent, so eager with their scrubbed and shaved faces they obviously took pains to effect with Emmy and Winnie around. They leaned forward a little, staring at her with eyebrows arched. She almost laughed.

  “I need to talk to you about something, Frank. It’s about Winnie.”

  “You want me to step away?” Roth asked.

  “No. You’re part of this. You should hear everything. If that’s all right with you anyhow, Maddie,” Starlight said.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “You’re right. Eugene should hear this too.”

  “Eugene,” Roth muttered. “Ain’t no proper name for a man. Mule maybe. Good hunting dog or a sheep.”

  They laughed and Starlight led them over to wooden chairs set under a tree. They sat and the men leaned forward, eyeing her.

  “Winnie’s having some trouble getting along at school,” Maddie said.

  “She ain’t quick enough on the uptake?” Roth asked. “Seems a smart enough thing around here.”

  “It’s not that. She can do the work and she does. It’s just that she seems to have trouble getting along with the other kids. Particularly the boys. She fights them. She’s been in two altercations already. This last time she gave Miles Paterson a bloody nose.”

  “Snot-nosed little bugger, that Miles,” Roth said. “Always figured him for a schoolyard sissy. Fightin’ girls ain’t no real boy thing.”

  “Eugene,” Starlight said quietly. “What do you figure the trouble is, Maddie?”

  “It goes beyond the whole new kid in the room thing, Frank. She just seems to have a bad attitude toward boys. They tease her, make fun sometimes like boys will do and she retaliates. It’s not good.”

  “You spoke to Emmy?”

  “I will. But I wanted to run something by you first.”

  “And that is?”

  “Well, it’s kinda coming out of left field here, and you can tell me if it’s too odd a thing to ask or too much even.”

  “Just go ahead and ask, Maddie,” Starlight said.

  “I have one of your pictures hanging in my living room. The one you took of the heron in the fog? It’s where I got the idea. I thought, that picture holds so much peace in it, so much serenity, such a pervasive calm. I wondered if being out on the land might help her. I wondered if you could spend time with her out there and show her what you find there, that connection to something bigger, maybe she might respond to that.”

  “Respond how?” Starlight asked.

  “I’m hoping with the same kind of calm,” Maddie said. “It worries me. Neither of them speak of where they came from. But I know that they were running. No one makes the kind of choices Emmy was making out of assurance. She was scared. So was Winnie. They’re still scared.”

  “They are kinda like a pair of barn cats them two,” Roth said. “Skittish. Take flight and cover easy.”

  “That’s why I’m worried for Winnie,” Maddie said. “I’m thinking it has something to do with men.”

  “If you thought that then why figure this was the place for them,” Starlight asked.

  “Well, you two aren’t really men.”

  They glanced at each other and then turned their gaze to her.

  “We ain’t?” Roth asked.

  Maddie grinned. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong. What I meant was you two aren’t typical men. You’re rough and gruff, Eugene, but you’re tame and gentle when it comes down to it. And, Frank, you’ve never been anything less than polite, mannered, and strong. You’re both gentlemen. You don’t have to work at it. You don’t put on a show. You’re just naturally good guys. I think that’s what those two need to see on a regular basis because I’m quite sure what they’ve experienced is the opposite.”

  Starlight studied her for a moment then kicked at the grass with the toe of his boot. “She’s steel, that’s sure,” he said. “But she’s propped up. I figure if whatever’s doin’ the proppin’ ever goes, she’d wilt right into the ground.”

  “That’s a good analysis, Frank. I think what’s propping her up is rage. Winnie too. Except she’s a child and she takes on what she feels in her mother. That’s why she fights with boys. They represent what’s closest to the source of her mother’s anger—and her own.”

  Both men nodded solemnly.

  “Shame,” Roth said. “Little kid havin’ to carry that. Me, I figure any man’d put that in a kid oughta be shot and pissed upon.”

  “Extreme,” Maddie said. “But yes. He would have something to answer for. And I think it’s not the result of just one episode. I think Emmy’s had a few rotten encounters in her time.”

  “Half-broke horse,” Starlight said.

  “Excuse me?” Maddie asked.

  He looked at her and there was a welling sorrow in his eyes. “Half-broke. Like when you get a horse through the groundwork then give up halfway through the teachin’ him to take weight on him. Always gonna stay half-broke. Half-tamed. Half himself. Half a horse.”

  “That’s a good metaphor for Emmy,” Maddy said. “But I was referring to the effect on Winnie.”

  “So was I,” Starlight said.

  She looked at him and he stood and stared off across the pasture to the rib of mountain at the end of it.

  “Do you think it would help, Frank? What I’m suggesting? Would you do it?”

  He put both hands on his hips and craned his neck and arched his back. When he turned he shrugged his shoulders and twisted his torso. He looked at her directly.

  “Everything’s predictable out there. Natural. Always seemed to me that the best place to learn about trust was out there. You learn to trust it and you learn to trust yourself framed against it. You can move easy out there knowin’ your place. Respect comes outta that. So does courage. Humility. Even a rough kinda wisdom. Faith maybe. But I know you come to love it.”

  Maddie and Roth watched him and waited but he didn’t offer anything more.

  “You’ll do it?” she as
ked quietly.

  “Land wouldn’a taught me nothin’ if I don’t,” he said and then he motioned to Roth and the two men walked away across the yard and began their chore again. Maddie watched them engage in their wordless teamwork and nodded and then rose and made her way to the house to speak with Emmy.

  * * *

  —

  She found him splitting wood and throwing it into a flatbed trailer hooked to a tractor. It was warm and he was sweating freely but he looked keenly alive with the work and she stood a moment and watched him. There was purpose to him. It seemed a relentless and mundane task to her but he was centred with it. He was lithe and quick and precise and the trailer was filling quickly. She stepped clearly into view when he bent to retrieve the maul where it lay against a fence post and turned to walk back to the sprawl of rounds waiting to be split. He wiped a forearm across his brow and nodded and walked quickly to the tractor and put his shirt on over the sleeveless single he worked in.

  “Emmy,” he said and drank from a plastic bottle.

  “I remember watching my father when he used to do this work,” she said.

  “You said he was a farmer.”

  “Yeah, but he did a lot of other things too. We moved lots. He worked construction, demolition, drove heavy equipment sometimes. But when he fell and cut and bucked for us, he seemed the most peaceful I can recall him being.”

  “I love it too. Something about taking care of things. The idea of warm, you know?”

  “I do. I love a wood fire.”

  “Eugene is always on me for a furnace. Me? I favour the old-fashioned. House heats up well with the fireplace.”

  “You related? You and Roth?”

  “No. Eugene come on as a hired hand a few years back. Figured it to be seasonal but he stayed through that first winter and when the thaw come it just seemed right that he stay. We seen through a few thaws together now.”

  “I like him. He’s funny.”

  “He’s cut from rough stuff, but he’s got a good heart. Tells a good story, works like no one’s business. I trust him. He’s my friend. Can’t see me workin’ this place without him now. Fact is, I don’t know I’d want to.”

  She moved closer and stepped over rounds of wood and when she was close to him she righted one and sat on the end of it. Starlight kicked one upright with his boot and sat a yard to her side. They both looked across the pasture. They could see the white shoulders of distant peaks with a deep blue sky standing on them. Cloudless. Calm.

  “Why you want to do this, Frank? For Winnie. You don’t know us. Seems you done so much already givin’ me this work, lettin’ us get set up here, get started.”

  Starlight nodded and looked down at his feet. He made considering his words a physical thing. She watched as he thought, his lips clinched and jaw set firm before he raised his head and scanned the work area and settled his view on the old tractor.

  “The man who raised me wasn’t my father,” he said finally. “My dad was a drunk. He died that way. Never knew my mother. Lost all ties to her when my dad passed. But I never felt no loss in that, never felt deprived, short-changed, cheated. Nothin’. I guess that’s on accounta the old man. He brought me up right here on this land. When I was small he started takin’ me out there. Horseback. We’d ride and he’d point things out to me and explain ’em as best he could. He taught me how to do things. Set snares, track, fish, hunt, build a lean-to. Boy things. Give me a gun and taught me to use it. He wasn’t Indian. But he knew I was and he give me everything he could that was close to that so I’d know something of myself.

  “When he got too old and gimped up with arthritis to ride I started goin’ out there on my own. Days I’d go. All alone on a horse. Come to love that. Things made sense out there where things in town didn’t. Never took to school. Got my education out there. Alone with all of that.”

  He stood up and walked to the fence. She followed him. He raised an arm and drew her attention along the far flank of ridge and down to where the pasture rubbed up against the foot of it, then across slowly to the barn, the house, and the outbuildings.

  “I felt right out there. Free of measuring up, free of what other people thought I might have to be. It was wild but it had order, flow, rhythm. You could learn that if you were out there enough. I was. It hooked me then. It hooks me now. All I ever had of Indian comes from that alone time there. That land and this land is all the ceremony I ever felt a need for. Watchin’ the sun come up and set on it become all the prayer I ever felt a need to say. This here is my history. This here is my home. It’s alive in me.

  “I see you two and I see you lookin’ for a place to set your feet down. All fidgety and nervous from the lack of it. Scared, even. I don’t know why. It ain’t my business to know. But the old man taught me if I can help someone I should. That land give me a place to put my feet down. Figure maybe I can give it to her.

  “Thing is, once it fills you, once you come to know it, you never got to feel lonely or lost or sorry no more. You always got a place to carry all that, leave it, let it go. And it comes to fill you again. Me? I figure Winnie could use some emptyin’. You too, if you’ll have it.”

  He turned to look at her. Her eyes were glistening and she turned away from him and raised a cuff to her face and wiped at the corners of them and sniffled. Then she sorted herself. Set her shoulders straight and stood taller and looked up at him. There was a slight quiver to her chin but she was resolute and held his gaze before breaking it off, then walked back to sit on the round again. He followed her. He sat without speaking. She ran her palms along the tops of her thighs and rubbed the small creases of fabric flat. They sat mutely for long minutes.

  “There’s whole parts of my life I don’t remember,” she said. “They’re gone. Blanked out. I know I never had a home. Not a proper one least ways. Not like you. Never had nowhere to set my feet down. Not as a kid and never as a grown woman. My dad used to touch me. He did that a lot. All kinds of ways. All kinds of ways.”

  She went quiet. He watched her and to Starlight it seemed as though she got smaller as she sat there on that round of wood. Tinier, helpless, shaky. He felt awkward. He felt too big, too heavy, too rough, too callused. He sat there with his hands folded together and waited her out.

  “I had lots of men but Winnie never had a father. Lotsa times they were nice to her to get to me. None of them were ever any good. I got used to that. Kinda thought it was what I was due. That I got dirtied when I was a girl and they could see that. Never had no good guy. I didn’t deserve that. I settled for the drunks, the fighters, the lazy, dirty, unpredictable ones. Those I thought I knew because they were most like my dad.”

  She looked over at him and he could see the struggle it took for her to talk like this. “Bet you’re second-guessing choosing to help us out now, ain’t ya, Frank?”

  “No,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry about what? You ain’t done nothin’.”

  “I’m sorry ya had to go through all that.”

  She laughed. It was ragged, halfway between a bray and a cackle. “Most of the time I chose it, if ya want to know the truth of it. Chose it because I didn’t deserve no better. Once Winnie was born I chose it so she could have a roof and a bed and food. Didn’t matter what they did to me then as long as she was gonna be okay. You drink enough you can blank out anything.”

  “You couldn’t though,” he said.

  “I guess I wasn’t as tough as I thought, no.”

  “Tougher,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “You got her out.”

  “Did I really? From what Maddie says maybe I can’t ever really get her out.”

  He scratched at the back of his head. “Well, I sorted out a lot of tough stuff on horseback and walkin’ on the land. Maybe we start with gettin’ her passed fightin’ with boys then we can help her get over fightin’ with herself.”

  “And me?”

  “You just mount up and see what happens.”


  “Neither of us ever rode a horse.”

  “I wasn’t talkin’ about no horse.”

  He walked back to retrieve the maul and set a round of wood on the splitting block and swung it in a long arc and struck it cleanly through the wood. She walked back to the house with the dull thunk of the work keeping tempo with her stride.

  HE TAUGHT THEM HOW TO SIT A HORSE every day after school, walking them along the sides of the stock pen. The girl was excited, happy, and she tried to do what he said. Emmy was grim and determined. She let her head get in the way of the rhythm of the horse. She yawed in the saddle and gripped the pommel to keep herself straight. He needed to know they could sit a horse without difficulty. The girl got there fastest. Emmy fought gamely but her insistence on feeling safe and secure in the saddle kept her back. After a week he believed they were ready for the backcountry trails.

  That Friday while they waited for Winnie to return from school he tacked up four horses. Then they loaded gear on a packhorse. It didn’t take long. When the girl jumped off the school bus and ran up the lane, they were ready. Once Emmy and Winnie had changed clothes, he tied rain slickers behind their saddles and led them out of the pen onto the hard bake of the pasture.

  “Just sit the horse like I showed ya,” he told them. “These are good girls you’re on. They’ll want to go nose to tail behind me, but hold them back some. Don’t want them to get too close. Eugene’ll bring up the rear with the packhorse. Nice steady line. Have fun. Relax and look around you. We’re headed into some mighty pretty country.”

  They walked acoss the pasture and he dismounted and opened the gate at the edge of a thin trail. When they’d passed through he closed it, remounted his horse, and guided them up the winding path that led up the ridge. He heard Emmy gasp. He glanced back behind him and caught her eye and nodded. She returned it stoicly. The trail had been worn in from years of use and wound between large ponderosa pines and polars. He had to yell over his shoulder for them to watch their legs as the horses edged around the trunks. It took them half an hour to crest the top. He walked his horse close to the edge and dismounted and then helped Emmy and Winnie down.