Starlight

by Richard Wagamese

  “Well, if you want to ask her to come to Vancouver ya better put the stick down and talk to her. I think you’ll find out that she’s been feelin’ the same way around you.”

  “How do you know that for sure?”

  “Because, old friend, when it comes to women I’m a walkin’, talkin’ encyclopedia.”

  Starlight chuckled. “Then how come in all this time I never ever seen ya with one?”

  “Truth?’

  “Yeah. Truth.”

  “I just pure wouldn’t want to be responsible for the effect of unleashing all of this raw masculinity on some unsuspecting woman.”

  Starlight shook his head and stood up and stretched. “Well then, Mr. Masculinity, maybe we better drain some of that off and get them boards painted before the sun goes down and Emmy has supper ready.”

  Roth clambered to his feet and they gathered the paint cans and brushes and walked to the ladders and climbed and soon lost themselves in the work, grinning at each other from time to time. Roth whistled a jaunty old tune while the sun sank deeper and closer to the serrated teeth of the trees at the edge of the field, and Starlight thought about the old barn and all that it held for him, and how life sometimes is a fresh board you add to something precious and priceless and worth holding on to forever.

  * * *

  —

  She found him standing in the mazy orange lantern glow of the barn, with one foot on the bottom rail of the partition, watching the horses prepare to settle in for the night. She stood beside him with her chin resting on her crossed forearms and admired the sleek calmness of the animals. Starlight glanced at her and when he caught her eye he grinned and nodded. Emmy offered a small smile in return and they stood there drinking in the soft clop of hoofs in the stall and the neighs and whinnies of the horses, the low stink of manure against the fresh chaff of dry straw, and the nutty smell of fresh oats in the trough. The lantern threw flickered shadows against the walls and cobwebbed windows, and Starlight took to studying the beams and rafters while Emmy turned her head and studied him.

  “What is it, Frank? Where are you?” she asked.

  “I like standing here at the end of a day,” he said. “This old barn holds a lot of me and I guess when I feel unsettled it feels better here than anywhere except maybe the land.”

  “I find it charming,” Emmy said.

  “Whattaya mean?”

  “You never changed anything. You kept it the same all these years except for the fixups and repainting that needed doing. But I walk in here and I can almost feel the years.”

  “I kept the old man here a long time after he died. His ashes, I mean. Kept his urn on a shelf in the tack room on accounta I didn’t know where he’da wanted them spread. Took me a couple years to figure that out. But sometimes it’s like I can feel him beside me in here. Comforting. You know?”

  “Not really. But I can imagine it. I never had a special place all my life. Not until I came here anyway.”

  Starlight turned to face her and leaned against the partition with one arm. “Funny thing is, the place I settled on wasn’t even here or anywhere on the property.”

  “Where was it then?”

  “Someplace the old man never even been. Two days’ ride from here. In the backcountry, where no one ever goes. Not even the quads and motorbikes. Pure horse country. I found it one day and it dawned on me that it was the spot where he’d be at peace.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “Never a footprint there except mine, the horses, and the wild things. No sign or scar of man anywhere,” Starlight said. “Them kinda places are gettin’ more and more scarce every year but ya can still find ’em if you look hard enough and you wanna be there strong enough.

  “So I took him there. Sat on a ridge facing west and when the sun threw the sky into shades of red and orange I never seen before either, I flung his ashes into the breeze and let him settle over all that beauty. Kinda felt him right there beside me when I done that and I knew I chose right.

  “Unbroken country. It was where he come to find himself when he was still nimble enough to ride. He give the love of it to me. I go to that ridge now and again and I always come back more peaceful, settled, anchored. Guess it turned out in the end that it was the reason I wasn’t meant to leave here.”

  Emmy’s face was soft in the flicker of the lantern. “That’s beautiful. Unbroken country. I don’t know as I’ve ever seen it. Or if I did I never recognized it for what it was.”

  “I figure it lives in a soft spot in the heart,” Starlight said and turned to face the horses again.

  “There’s so much to you, Frank. So many layers. I’m always grateful when you share them with me.”

  “People are unbroken country too,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Guess I mean that when you walk into one of them places for the first time ya feel spooked kinda, scared, not sure of what you’ll find there or if ya can find your way out once you’re in. Like coming to know someone. Losing yourself in what ya find.”

  She stood and turned to face him directly and when he noticed he turned to her as well. They stood looking at each other and the horses neighed quietly and there was the sound of a night owl high in the rafters then a hushed flutter of wings, and the barn lapsed into silence again.

  “I feel like I’m in unbroken country here, Frank,” Emmy said. “I didn’t want to speak of it. Scared, I guess, that if I said anything I’d lose what I was finding.”

  “And what is it you’re finding?” Starlight asked.

  “Something I never had before. Something Winnie never had either. A place where we feel safe, secure. Where I don’t have to keep a candle burning in the dark so I can sleep. A home, I guess. But it’s you too. I’m finding you and I don’t want to lose that.

  “My life ain’t perfect. Never has been. There’s been a lot of men. A lot of pain and struggle. All kinds of hopes and dreams dashed and smashed and broken. All kinds of do-overs that never worked out, and I come away from all of it feeling and believing that I deserved nothing different. That my life was supposed to be one long unhealed bruise.

  “Here, with you, it’s different. Like time moves different. Like I move different. Like there’s something drawing me forward deeper into this country that I don’t recognize.”

  Starlight stretched his arms open wide and Emmy stepped close to him shyly. He pulled her close to his chest and brushed her hair back along her temple gently with the tips of his fingers. “Ya know the smallest mare? The one Winnie rides?” he asked her.

  “Yeah. She loves that horse.”

  “Well, she come here from the animal rescue. Fella that had her didn’t tend to her or any of his other stock. They were all sick and dehydrated, starving, beaten, skittish as all hell. She was the worst of the lot. She wouldn’t even let me close for the longest time. Had to keep her in a pen by herself on accounta she was fearful of the other horses.”

  “But she’s so gentle now. So calm and settled,” Emmy said.

  “I’d come out here and roll up in a blanket and sleep the night with her. Never make a sudden move or try to get closer. Took weeks but she come to trust me and soon I could feed her oats outta my hand. She let me brush her out and I’d walk her by the halter around the pasture on accounta all the hurt made her forget how to be a horse. I’d walk her every day. Then I’d trot, then full-out run, and pretty soon when she got her strength back I could turn her loose in that field and she’d gallop and play like the horse she was meant to be. Didn’t try to change her at all. Just let her find herself in the love I was giving.

  “So I guess I figure that love’s unbroken country too. Me an’ that little mare moved into it together and she became a really good horse. It didn’t make all the hurt she felt before disappear. Didn’t change anything that come before. It just made her able to forget it and live a different way. The way she was meant to.

  “Having you here’s like that for me,” Starligh
t said. “You make me forget how I lived up to now. And if it helps at all, I’m scared too. Scared to speak of it, of ruining it, changing it into something else, and losing it. Was Roth give me enough gumption to let you know where I was with things.”

  Emmy stepped back from him a half-step. “Well, here’s to Eugene,” she said.

  She stood on her tiptoes and reached up and pulled his face down and kissed him softly. The gentle warmth took Starlight by surprise and he kissed her back, taking care to be tender, calm, unhurried through the pounding of his heart. He leaned forward so she could move off her tiptoes. She opened her mouth and the feel of her tongue on his was an elegant frenzy and he pulled her to him, careful not to break the embrace. He let his tongue move in unison with hers and the effect was dizzying, and he wanted to moan but held his silence and let the kiss take on its own rhythm. He felt stirrings strange and unfamiliar moving in him and he let himself feel them, and when she finally broke the kiss and stepped back to look at him he grinned shyly.

  “What was that for?” he asked.

  “For unbroken country,” she said.

  Then she kissed him again.

  THEY DROVE AND LINGERED DAYS IN Field and Trail and Castlegar, the small mountain towns where lumbermen lived and worked, but wending their way through that endless beauty brought nothing to Cadotte but a heavier, harder spear of rage and he took no comfort in drink or women or the feigned comradery and quick friendships spawned by big money, sweat, and lives lived untethered and wild. Instead, he took to fighting. He found that he could lose himself in savagery. That thick coil of vengeance he carried in his gut could unsnake itself and take on the qualities of fists and kicks and hammer blows to heads and bellies and the cracking and breaking of teeth and ribs and other bones. So that he found a grim satisfaction in pushing men to fight. In those booze-filled nights in working men’s towns, such contests of will and rage were easy to start and he let the vehemence of his shattered ego rain punishment on men in ones or twos or threes. He was thrilling to watch. For such a bulky man he was light on his feet and lizard fast. He punished men. He knew precisely how hard and often to attack and hit, and he toyed with them, bloodying faces and battering knees and hips and shoulders so that in the end his adversaries became limp, defenceless rags of men who dropped at his feet eventually, and he’d raise his fists and face to the ceiling of the sky and howl in a basso keening imbued with every ounce of hate he carried for the woman he hunted unceasingly. She would be his ultimate triumph. Besting men was only the venting outlet for his vitriol and he sought and found it everywhere.

  For his part, Anderson watched and pondered as deeply as he was capable the fury Cadotte could unleash. He’d rub at his own scars and feel the clutch of resentment and anger. But it paled in comparison. Cadotte simmered in a rich venomous stew and there was a part of Anderson that understood and feared it at the same time. He couldn’t harm a child. He knew that. After all those months on the road he wasn’t even certain he could hurt Emmy. The unrelenting prowling through bars and low neighbourhoods had tired him, made him sad almost at the lot so many people drew, and he looked back at his own meagre upbringing and the ruptured family life that booze and drugs and chronic poverty had caused and wished secretly for a way to simply walk away from Cadotte’s stalking journey. They might not find them anyway. It was a big country and Emmy was cagey enough to know where to go to ground for safety and anonymity. He knew that now. So while Cadotte raged, Anderson brooded and watched for his chance to alter his own course.

  But Cadotte was a black hole that absorbed and killed everything, and made it disappear into a whirling vortex whose only gravity was pain. Still, Anderson wondered if there was a way of escaping the heavy pull of all that sullen energy.

  He was at the wheel as they drove through the harrowing curves of road that dipped severely from the heights of cordillera to the flat, semi-desert of Grand Forks and Osoyoos. It was wonderful territory but he was too fraught with anxiety to appreciate it. He didn’t fear Cadotte. But any word that went against his intention was liable to throw him into a fury that only fists and boots could resolve. Anderson didn’t need the taste of his own blood in his mouth so he spoke his mind carefully now.

  “You worry me, Jeff,” he said.

  “Worry you how exactly?” Cadotte answered. He slouched in his seat with a soiled and tattered John Deere hat pulled low over his eyes.

  “Yer wild and gettin’ wilder.”

  “Sowing oats is all I’m doing.”

  “No. Ya moved past that three towns ago. Now you’re downright vicious.”

  “I never been the polite type.”

  “I know that. But that guy last night? Ya coulda stopped at the broken nose. But ya pulled him to his feet and knocked his teeth out. Then you threw him out the door and over the railing into the parking lot.”

  “Fuckin’ guy bit me,” Cadotte said and held up the knuckles of his right hand. The bite mark was evident.

  “By then it was all he could do. You had him. He was done but you just kept on plowing into him. Yer lucky the owner didn’t call the cops.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess God give some people enough sense to go on livin’ didn’t he.”

  “But he coulda. Then what kinda shape would we be in? I don’t favour lockup. I’m too damn old for that shit.”

  “At least I’m out there swingin’. I don’t recall seein’ you jump in when someone’s buddies come for backup.”

  “You don’t need my help. You’re a madman.”

  “I got her harnessed.”

  “It don’t look it. Makes me wonder if yer gonna be careful enough not to leave sign even if we do find Emmy.”

  “Oh, we’ll find her. And I ain’t crazy enough to leave anything that points to us. Believe me.”

  “Still worries me.”

  “Let it. I don’t give a shit.”

  “That worries me too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re talkin’ major charges and major time if we let anything lead back to us. You ain’t out fer evening things up, Jeff. You’re out for revenge. Big-time.”

  “So you think I ain’t capable? That I’m wacko? Looney tunes?”

  “No. I ain’t sayin’ that. What I’m sayin’ is I think ya gotta ease back on the throttle some is all.”

  “Don’t get yer panties in a knot. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Then tell me what that is so I know too.”

  “I’m openin’ the valve and lettin’ off steam so’s I can think straight when the time comes.”

  “That’s one hell of a lot of steam yer carryin’ then.”

  Cadotte sat straight up and pushed the cap back on his head and turned to face Anderson, who glanced quickly at him and then back at the road. “You had the same stoked up when we started this. Makes me kinda wonder about you now too.”

  “I’m still here ain’t I?”

  “Are ya? Really? Or you just puttin’ in time to make a good show of yerself so I don’t pound into you too?”

  Anderson turned his head and glared at Cadotte. “I told ya, Jeff. I don’t fear you. You can bring shit anytime so long as ya can take it back when it’s handed out.”

  Cadotte laughed mockingly. “If that time were ever to come, Anderson, you’d be wishin’ ya had yer mama to hide behind. Trust me.”

  “I’m tryin’ to trust you, Jeff. But you’re makin’ it hard by the way yer actin’. And don’t worry about me. I ain’t left the bus.”

  “That’s good because this bus is goin’ all the way to the end of the road. And findin’ Emmy? My gut’s leadin’ me and I can tell ya we’re gettin’ close. Ain’t nothing to stop us now but someone backin’ off and that ain’t likely to be me.”

  “Me neither. Just so ya know.”

  “That’s good. Any more frettin’ ya wanna talk out or you done wimperin’?”

  “No wimpering from me. I was just choosing to speak my mind is all. Clear the air, ya know?”

 
; Cadotte was silent. “Ain’t no clearin’ of no air gonna happen until Emmy gets what’s due. You’n me? We look in the fucking mirror every day, see them scars she left, remember how it felt crawlin’ out of that blazin’ wreck of a cabin and the fuckin’ pain of it. Remember she tried to kill us. Can you still do that?”

  They drove out of a long, snaking curve and onto a small plateau and they could see the land spread out before them shimmering in the heat and distance below them. Anderson found himself wishing for a calm place like that beyond all roads and thoughts of vengeance, and wondered if he could ever come to that, break free of Cadotte’s hold on him and leave, wander off alone to find the shelter of another cabin on a verdant green plain on the side of a river, smoking a pipe on a porch and growing old quietly, easily, without the jut of anger, resentment, and unspoken fear pressing against the inside of his ribs. He glanced at Cadotte, who stared out the windshield too. He wondered where his thoughts took him. But all he could sense was a horrible cloud of darkness around the man and he felt anxious and overwhelmed.

  “I can still do that,” he said finally and drove down onto that shimmering plain with a river running through it and wondered if it was true.

  STARLIGHT TOOK THE ROPE HACKAMORE from its peg in the tack room and put it on the old mare and rode her bareback up the ridge beyond the field in the first gauzy light of morning. They were set to leave in a rented car later that day and he wanted to spend time alone on the land to ground himself for the jangle of the city. The horse was happy with the walk and she neighed and tossed her head, and Starlight smiled at the familiar gaiety and small jounce to her step. They made the top of the ridge just as the sun flooded the valley below in a scarlet flush leaning to orange, and he dismounted and walked to a large rock and sat while the horse was content to nibble at twitch grass. He liked the small echo the clop of her hoofs cast back at him from across that verdant depth of space below. He rolled a smoke and sat eyeing the horizon to the southwest. From the farm, the land would slowly begin to fall away, descending gradually then sharply to the coast and the strait and the sea he’d only seen once before. The route he’d chosen to drive would give Emmy and the girl an opportunity to experience vistas that would fill them with the same joy he felt watching the land assert itself, become itself, and he smiled knowing the look of wonder that would set upon their faces as they travelled through it all. He wanted that for them. Emmy had agreed to go readily. They’d packed the night before and he and Roth had loaded the trunk with suitcases and packs before they’d retired to their beds. Now, sitting in solitude, studying the wide expanse of peak and plain and snowcap, he moved out of anxiety and welcomed the adventure the city and the showing at the gallery would bring. That surprised him. He had no truck with hustle and bustle nor the radical palette of colour and light and noise the city offered and had gone out of his way for years in order to avoid it. But that kiss in the barn lingered on his lips and he found himself wanting to bring Emmy and Winnie to the world and the world to them even if he didn’t crave much of it beyond the farm himself. He touched his lips lightly with one finger. It had simply been a mouth before. Now, it was altered as he was altered by the mystery of a woman, her touch, her warmth, the secret promise in that embrace that drew him deeper, further into its hold.