Medicine Walk

by Richard Wagamese

  “I hope that ain’t supposed to be a comfort,” the kid said.

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “You should know,” the kid said and stood up suddenly. The motion made his father startle and he groaned at the pain it caused and gripped at his belly and gritted his teeth. The kid just looked at him balefully. “You don’t get to say things like that and just die. You don’t get to get off that easy.”

  It took his father some time to regain composure. He wiped at his face that was glazed with sweat and his hand shook. “I know what’s owed,” he said. “I know that there’s no way in hell I’m gonna be able to make up to ya what I took by not bein’ around. But I can’t give ya years, Frank.”

  “I don’t want years. I wanna be able to quit lookin’ at women I see and wonderin’ if that’s how she looked.” The kid punched both fists against his thighs and turned around and back again. “But you can’t give me that neither. Can ya?”

  He waited. His father’s breathing was shallower now and he laid there with his eyes closed so that the kid stepped around the fire to lean close enough to see if he was still there. He poked him and his father opened one eye and stared. “Can ya move me to the rock, Frank?”

  “You’re damn poorly.”

  “I wanna sit and watch the light break over the valley when it comes.”

  “That’ll be a while,” the kid said.

  “Even so.”

  The kid rose and retrieved the last bottle of Becka’s concoction and he held it to his father’s lips. He could only manage a small sip. The kid set a few more pieces of wood on the fire and then helped his father struggle to his feet. They shuffled across the open space to where the rock sat near the rim of the ridge. The valley below them was an open yaw of dark. Nothing was distinguishable. The sky was a dazzle of stars. The kid helped his father to a seat on the rock and he felt him shiver. It was more of a spasm and his father shuddered with the force of it. The kid wound the blanket tight around him. “She’da been proud to know ya as her son.”

  The words hung in the air and the kid slumped to the ground beside him. They both gazed out across the open valley. His belly felt raw and he rubbed at it and had nothing to say in reply so he sat there mutely and looked up at his father, who rocked slowly back and forth with his hands clutched at his own gut. “I want years,” his father said. “I want all of ’em. Every single wasted, drunken one. But I can’t get ’em back. I know it ain’t no, whattaya call it, legacy or nothin’, but all’s I got left is the story of her now.” He looked up into the sky and began talking again.

  “She got on as a camp cook and me, I landed work at a sawmill. She didn’t wanna stay at the camp so we found us a cabin by a lake with a thin, unmarked road leading down to it. It was a trapper’s cabin. Hadn’t been used in a long time. She come to love it right off. But me, all I could see was a mess.

  “But she got me goin’ on fixin’ it. We got to it every day after work. That girl could use some tools and it surprised me. She taught me to chink walls with mud and newspaper and moss and strips of cedar bark. She showed me how to mix mortar for the chimney stones and how to split cedar shakes for the roof. We even lifted the floorboards and insulated the space down there. Then we done the same with the walls and she helped me tote gyp board from the truck. Took three months to get it ready to take a winter.

  “We dug us a couple flowerbeds and a garden plot for the next spring. She even had me dig out a root cellar for the turnips and potatoes and onions she was gonna grow. She taught me to make chairs outta willow wands and we set them on the porch we built so we could look out over the lake come evening.

  “Funny thing is that in all that time I never thoughta drink. I had pocketfuls of cash from the job but it all went to her and she spent it on makin’ that rat hole of a cabin into a home. Never seemed like work neither. Seemed natural. Like breathing. Even the shitty jobs never got me down like they usedta. Never had me no trade but I worked hard an’ my reputation got good and after a time I was seldom out of work for more’n a day or two. The jobs were never no hell but it was cash money an’ meant we could be okay.”

  He stopped talking and the kid could see how harrowing it was for him to be back there. He was shaking but it wasn’t just the sickness. His eyes were wide and he stared without blinking at a spot just beyond the rim of the ridge, barely breathing, his jaw slack and quivering. The kid wanted to do something to break the awful silence but he fidgeted and couldn’t think of anything. In the end he just sat and waited for his father to continue.

  “I recall standin’ on the porch early one morning with a mug of coffee, looking out across the lake, an’ I felt like for the first time I could stand this life. I could settle. Every time I’d drop her at the camp I’d find myself not hardly able to wait for when I’d pick her up again. Strange. Me always wantin’ to come back. I spent my whole life runnin’ away not runnin’ to. She brung that alive in me, Frank.

  “It got me to wonderin’. Got me wonderin’ if time could make goin’ back to other things possible too. Goin’ back to other people, other places. My mother and such. Never ever thought them kinda thoughts before. Found myself wonderin’ if returnin’ was somethin’ a man could do, if ya could walk back over your trail and maybe reclaim things. They were odd thoughts but she hadda way of getting them into my head.”

  “Did ya tell her?” the kid asked.

  “Nah. I never figured anyone’d care about what was goin’ on in my head. Not even her. Guess the strangeness of those thoughts made me kinda ashamed.”

  “She mighta liked to know. Mighta been good for her to know how she was gettin’ to you.”

  “Yeah,” his father said slowly. “Still an’ all, I never could cotton on to the idea of just spillin’ things out.”

  “Your loss,” the kid said.

  His father just stared poker-faced at the fire and for a moment the kid thought he’d been too hard. But his father began to speak again.

  “She found out she was pregnant in the fall of that first year. I just sat in the willow rocker on the porch not able to say anythin’. I stretched out a hand and cupped her belly and if I never felt no baby then, I sure felt her roundness and the idea of magic goin’ on right beneath my hand. I ain’t never been humbled like that ever again.

  “I recall that night so clear. Layin’ beside her, holdin’ her, listenin’ to her breathin’ with my hand still on her belly. Felt like I was parta her too, just like the life she got inside her. Like you an’ me was the same right then, Frank, on accounta we both needed her fer life. An’ that thought scared me more’n I ever been scared and I woke up to fear.”

  His father paused and the kid regarded him wordlessly. When he lifted his head and turned to look at him the kid could see the desperation in him and he moved in front of him in case he lunged for the edge of the cliff.

  “You were scared ya couldn’t be what ya had to be,” the kid said.

  “More’n that,” his father said. “Scared I couldn’t be what I never was. I never told her about Jimmy, about my mother, even though she told me I could tell her anythin’. I was ashameda myself, Frank. Bone deep shamed. I was scared if I started in on tellin’ about myself I’d break down an’ I wanted to be strong for her. I really did. But layin’ there knowin’ how weak I really was brung on the dark in me. The dark that always sucked me back into drinkin’. I woke up to the belief that I’d always lose or destroy them things or people that meant the most to me cuz I always done that. Now there was her. Now there was you. An’ there was still me.

  “Her sleepin’ beside me with you in her belly scared the livin’ beJesus outta me. Felt like I was on a runaway train headin’ into the darkness and was no way I was gonna be able to stop it.”

  The kid turned his back and looked out across the empty space above the valley. He could feel his gut churn. He didn’t want to hear what was coming but he couldn’t shake the need to. The confusion swirled in him and he put his hands on his hips
and lifted his head and looked up into the sky. The stars offered no comfort, and the chill of the wind seemed to seep in and fill him. Finally, he turned and knelt in front of his father, who was slumped on the rock, the blanket clutched about him like a shroud.

  At first it was a beer or two at lunch. Then it became more. It just did. It just seemed to happen and it wasn’t long before he was in the lure of it; the ongoing thought of it, the amber glow of a glass, the low burn of booze hitting his belly, the cottony feeling at the sides of his head that chased all thoughts away.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You worry me.”

  “Just tryin’ to relax is all.”

  “I need you with me, El. Don’t let that stuff take you away.”

  “I won’t.”

  By the time she was due he was drinking in secret; furtive gulping and then the aftertaste of guilt and shame that only made more possible. He couldn’t tell her about that either. He couldn’t sleep. The certainty of failure, the landscape of his secrets, became the terror that kept him awake.

  He was in town at a tavern one night that was slick with rain. It had grown late and he found himself broke without anyone he knew to borrow from. So he stumbled to the truck and aimed it along the highway to the unmarked road. He drove clutching the wheel hard with both hands and fighting against the reeling sensation in his head. Their gravel road was loose with mud from the downpour and steering along the ruts was a heaving, tossing affair that made him sick to his stomach. When he got to the cabin he wobbled out of the truck and lost his footing in the grass and pitched face first onto the ground. It made him laugh. He raised his head and wiped the muck away and saw that the door to the cabin was thrown open and there were no lights.

  He scrambled to his feet and lurched to the porch calling her name and clawing toward the door frame. He almost fell over her. She lay a few feet from the doorway with her hands clutched to her belly. When he tried to move her she screamed. It took everything he had to get her to the truck.

  The continuing rain had turned the muck of the road into a thin grog and he slid about and got stuck. He grabbed a handful of pebbles and small stones to stick under the wheels and somehow gained sufficient purchase to keep moving. She was groaning beside him as he drove. He got stuck again and it took a desperate back and forth to get moving again and each hurl forward drew another harsh gasp and scream from her. He put a hand to her head. It was blazing. When he made the highway she’d curled into a ball on the floor and he drove as fast as possible. The rain splattering down like paint and the booze making every motion slow and lugubrious and he lurched into the parking lot of the small hospital barely able to see.

  The baby was in full kneeling breech. She fought gamely to deliver him. It took everything she had and when they finally turned to an emergency Caesarean she ebbed away. He was pacing in the hall when the doctor told him, sobered some by coffee but still lurid with whisky. He couldn’t concentrate. He half grinned at the doctor, who took him by the elbow and led him to an alcove and spoke to him plainly, sternly, until the weight of the words hit him square in the chest.

  “She had a chance if she had made it here in time,” the doctor said.

  “I was at work,” he muttered.

  “You’re drunk. Did you get that way on the job?”

  “I ain’t all that bad.”

  “You need to get yourself together.”

  He stood and dropped one shoulder so he could angle out through the doors without falling. The pain was roaring in him and he only knew one way to quiet it.

  23

  “NEVER GOT TO SAY GOODBYE,” his father said.

  The kid slumped to the ground and sat with his head to his knees and his arms wrapped around his shins. There were no words. There was only that ache in his belly like hunger only deeper, set more in the bones than in the flesh. He rubbed at it but it only felt cramped and dull and empty. He raised his head and looked at his father. His face was desolate. The kid could hear the rattle of his breath. One bony finger tapped anxiously on his thigh and the kid watched him and waited for more words but there were none coming. That angered him. He waited and he felt the pressure of rage build up in his chest and he rose quickly and strode off.

  He wandered along the line of the ridge and into the trees. The deep shadow calmed him. He leaned his back on a stout birch and kicked at the moss and grit with his boot heels. Family. The story of him etched in blood and tears and departures sudden as the snapping of a bone. When the tears came they were sudden as that. He let himself cry and the feeling of it scared him. The release uncontained, erupting over him. When it ended he was spent and he slumped down and sat on the moss. It was quiet. The forest was still and cool and he rubbed his hands together to warm them. His father would die, and he would never know his mother. He would never know her touch, the feel and smell of her or know the sound of her voice. He would never know the way she looked. She would remain as shadowed as the trees and rocks and bracken that surrounded him. There was a hole in his history and there was nothing that would ever fill it. He stood quickly and kicked at the tree, a shower of twigs and dead leaves fluttering down around him. He picked up a handful of stones and threw them at trees and across the open space as hard as he could. He picked up more and hurled them until his arm succumbed to the effort and he leaned over with his hands on his knees and drew deep, quaking breaths until he calmed again and felt strong enough to return to the man who was his father.

  His father sat exactly like he’d left him, with the blanket snug around his shoulders. The kid didn’t trust himself to speak. There was an odour coming off him. It was mouldy like compost but higher like rot, as though his flesh would die long before his heart. “Christ, I’m thirsty, Frank,” he said.

  The kid walked back to the fire, stoked it, and retrieved the canteen and the bottle of medicine. He turned toward the rim of the ridge again and saw the outline of his father perched against the great gulf of the sky and the swooning depth of the valley in front of him. All that emptiness. He walked slowly and when he got to his father he nudged him lightly on the shoulder and he startled and looked at him sideways all gape-mouthed and wild. “Here,” the kid said softly. He held out the canteen and his father slumped in relief.

  “Thought you was somethin’ else,” he said.

  “Like what?” the kid asked. He stepped in front of him and held the canteen to his father’s lips. He could only sip at it. When he was finished he tried to splash some of the water on his face but his hands shook too violently. The kid put the canteen on the ground and heard quiet retching and when he turned he saw his father bent forward vomiting on the blanket that was covering his legs. Some of the spume landed on the kid and he wiped a hand at it. It was gritty-looking, like coffee grains, and smelled like blood and the odour he’d detected earlier.

  His father groaned. The kid helped him sit back up. He calmed after a few moments and the kid took the ruined blanket and replaced it with his own coat. He gathered the edges around his father and pulled it as snug as possible. “I got the medicine,” he said.

  “I don’t think I could keep ’er down,” his father said. He was shivering again and the words came out in blurts.

  “It’s here anyhow,” the kid said.

  “All right.”

  “I could get you back to the fire. She’d be warmer for ya there.”

  His father shook his head. And held the edges of the coat and huddled tighter on the rock. “No. Thanks. I’d rather be here.” The light had eased upward and the kid could see a thin scrim of indigo to the east.

  The kid leaned on one knee in front of his father. “Did you ever tell that Bunky what happened?” he asked. “Mighta been someone to turn to.”

  “Never thought to. The man woulda had no time for me certain.”

  “You’re sayin’ that ya never once thought about him. Scared shit like you was, ya never once gave him a thought. I think you’re lying
.”

  His father tried to glare, but it didn’t have much force.

  “You might as well just go on and tell me who the old man is then.” The kid stood up and faced his father square. His fists were clenched at his sides.

  His father lifted his head and looked at him sadly. He swallowed and the kid could see the effort it took. He closed his eyes. “He’s Bunky. He’s the man I stole your mother from,” he said without opening his eyes.

  The kid blinked and just stood looking at his father, whose eyes were still closed. He walked a few steps to the edge of the ridge and stared out across the valley, then turned and faced him again. “That’s kinda how I had it figured. But how’d I come to be there, you talkin’ like he hated you an’ all?”

  “I took ya there when ya were a week or so old.”

  “Why? On accounta you were scared that you’d hurt me?”

  His father’s chin jutted out and for a moment the kid thought he would press himself to his feet. “No,” he said firmly. “It was more’n that. I didn’t want to hate you.”

  The kid startled. “What?”

  “Every time I looked at you all’s I could see was her. Hell, I was drunk, Frank. Drunk and sick and tired and hurtin’ like a bastard. Like all my skin been scraped off. I couldn’t move without hurtin’.”

  “You thought I killed her. Comin’ out breeched like that?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “I thought I did.”

  “I don’t get it then.”

  “I thought me lovin’ her killed her. Looking at you reminded me of that.”

  “And he just took me in? This man who had no time for you?”

  “It took some doin’, but he done it for her. He loved her. Maybe bigger’n me. Maybe his was the right one all the time and I buggered that. So I brung you to him. Only thing in my life that I can say I’m proud of.”