by Don Gillmor
The sun was higher, and would bring a late-summer heat by afternoon. He had walked three miles, he estimated. The mountains were bright and clean looking, polished blue and grey. The breeze was picking up, the gun heavy in his hand. It was a good thing he’d brought the dogs, or that they had brought themselves. They would find their way home and then bring someone out here. It wouldn’t come as a surprise, certainly. Still, they would need proof.
MICHAEL MOUNTAIN HORSE
1908
So Macdonald creates a country in his own image. Messy, sprawling: the father of us all. English and French sharing a country. In Europe they wouldn’t share a pot of tea. It took a lot to bring those two together, but the Americans were a lot. All that patriotism just across the border, those dark imperial dreams, and finally, those soldiers. At the beginning of the Civil War, in 1861, the Americans had an army of thirteen thousand: reluctant farmers, the indigent, the disturbed. An army like most others. Then suddenly there were two million soldiers hardened in battle. It was a violent time. And larcenous. The Americans stole Florida, California, and Texas and were prepared to take the rest of the continent. Maybe they didn’t need to invade Canada. We’d get tired of the stuffy British and want to join the life of the party. We hoped the Americans would destroy themselves through war, but they didn’t; it only made them stronger. The four colonies united for protection against this compelling beast, but there still wasn’t any real shared nationalism. We knew what we were against but not what we were for.
The hope was that this would come with westward expansion (an old trick). Thompson mapped the West, Macdonald claimed it, but it still had to be filled with people. In that vast empty space was the grandeur of empire. Or so they hoped, anyway.
Michael looked at Billy, a few hairs sprouting from his unblemished face, the hint of manhood. His Indianness, a word Michael had heard in the teacher’s lounge, seemed accentuated, the gift of silence now official.
How do you lure the millions to the wilderness? In 1900 Wilfrid Laurier’s government sent out a million pamphlets, sunny fraudulent offers of free land, a balmy climate, freedom from persecution. They hoped for British and Americans, and there were some of those, but not enough. Germans and Scandinavians were next on the list. Then, finally, Ukrainians, Doukhobors, Jews, Galicians of every stripe. No one’s first choice, but the landscape was so pure, it would change them. They would become clean and Aryan; the winds would scour them, the snows cleanse them, and a Protestant empire would rise up on the plains. What the pamphlets really offered was Christian redemption.
Michael pondered Billy’s life. Bathed by the nurse every week, his black hair cut once a month, occasional visits from friends, friends that would stop coming soon, if they hadn’t already. The visits from relatives would be less frequent too; his father off working the northern oil fields, his mother worn out. The baths would become cursory; occasionally they’d forget to bathe him. His green gown held the faint generic stains of suffering: leaking wounds or bad food that couldn’t be removed even with the hospital’s abrasive soap. Without the attention of others, what was he?
It was mostly British and Americans around here. The Ukrainians had gone farther north to farm. The Mormons stayed in the south. Among the local ranchers, my mother was a curiosity, the Indian widow of a British aristocrat whose nickname was Lord Gin. You don’t always pick up on the nuances of adults when you’re six years old, but you feel something. The men liked my mother. She was beautiful then. The women didn’t invite her to join the baking circle or the Theatrical Group, or any of the other clubs they formed to keep rural loneliness at bay.
All the kids in the area went to a one-room schoolhouse just south of here. It’s gone now. There were twelve of us, ranch kids who walked or rode to school every day, arriving at different times, an odd crew; the youngest five, the oldest seventeen. My brother, Stanford, and I walked to school each morning. The teacher might have been twenty and she knew that most of us would only need to read well enough to get through an operating manual or a cookbook, to be able to calculate the weight gain of a heifer. She did her best with us.
I was happy to lose myself in books, even then. One day she came over to help me with the letter G, which I had trouble writing. She knelt beside the desk and took my hand in hers and wrote a dozen Gs, breathing in my ear. When she softly let go of my hand and I mechanically produced more Gs, she whispered, “I knew you could do it.” She smelled like soap, like flowers. I was so overwhelmed by her that I burst into tears. After school, Rory, the seventeen-year-old, teased me about it. He kept at it, wiping his eyes, pretending he was crying. Stanford was thirteen then and he told Rory to stop but he wouldn’t. Stanford hit him in the face. It surprised everyone, Rory certainly, but I think even Stanford. That punch opened up something inside Stanford, and out spilled the violence that was coiled there. He went after Rory, knocked him down and kept hitting him. It took the teacher and half the class to pull him off. Everyone was screaming. Stanford’s face looked like he was somewhere else, as if part of him wasn’t there. When it was over, the whole class lay in the grass, including the teacher, for five minutes, no one saying anything. Then we all went home. Stanford didn’t say a word over those three miles.
Once in a while, Stanford and I would sneak out at night hoping something mysterious would happen in the darkness. One night we walked to Rory’s ranch, more than five miles away. The sky was clear and we had that energy that comes with doing something illicit. When we got there, we stared down from a small hill and saw two figures in the moonlight. The wind was blowing hard so we couldn’t hear anything. We crept around and got as close as we could, maybe thirty yards away. It was Rory and his father. His father was screaming something and he had a gun. Rory was throwing tin plates up in the air—the kind they used to feed the ranch hands—and his father was shooting at them with a pistol. The wind would take the plates and move them on crazy, sudden tangents. They were impossible to hit. Maybe the father was drunk. He was screaming but you couldn’t hear what. You could see Rory was scared. A plate came zipping back toward him and we thought Rory’s father might shoot his own son by accident. They were out there for half an hour, then the father sat down on the grass and buried his face in his hands and Rory ran away. It was like witnessing a secret but not knowing what it was. I asked Stanford if everyone had secrets like this and he told me they probably did.
Of course, we had our own secret: our father’s death. It wasn’t a secret for long. It was the kind of story that sustains people in a small community, one that gives them a chance to point to their own work ethic and Christian values and to sit in judgment, saying it was a terrible thing but thinking secretly that it was inevitable. It confirmed that their way of life was God’s chosen path. For years Dexter existed like a lesson from the Bible, his story repeated by the righteous.
When you enter history, you don’t know it of course. You’re born into famine or war or peace and think: This is the world. As you get older you start to piece it together; x led to y, which created z, and z took its toll on all of us.
1
ALBERTA, 1908
Just to be part of this crowd, with its wary hick yearning. Two boys hiding under the bleachers, shaded from the August sun by five hundred bodies, the town reassembled in orderly rows, waiting to be dazzled. A few shards of sunlight penetrated. Michael Mountain Horse and his brother Stanford stared out onto the bleached infield, its thin coat of dust sitting lightly after twenty-two days without rain. Michael lay on an angled support beam with Stanford standing behind him, sharing a sightline that looked past a woman’s ankles (themselves an unspoken entertainment).
The cowboy moved his rope in a sinuous dance, interrupted by twists that sent the circle spinning over his theatrically smiling face. He brought the rope to a vertical position, creating a doorway that he stepped in and out of, a jig he kept up for a minute, the rope glancing onto the hardtack and sending up sprays of dust. He had leather chaps with silver stud
s down the sides, boots with red hearts sewn on the front, and a white hat. The wide circle of rope tightened into a smaller, faster, more sinister circle, moving above his head as he walked around the infield until it landed softly, like a living thing, around the budding corpulence of Percy Wedgewood, a Methodist preacher.
“Got myself a sinner,” roared Guy Weadick, and the crowd roared back. “What is it the Bible says? ‘All we like sheep have gone astray,’ well …” He laughed.
Wedgewood smiled weakly.
Crouched in the half-light, Michael was transfixed by the spectacle. “What’s he going to do with that preacher?” he whispered to Stanford.
“Nothing good, I imagine.”
Michael held his breath in anticipation and then let it out slowly and deliberately.
Weadick waved his white hat and kept hold of Percy, whose face was bubbling with perspiration, his hands pinned to his sides, a baby’s hands.
“A man who walks with God fears nothing, isn’t that right, Reverend? But there is one thing he should fear. One thing that every manjack with a lick of sense, whether he is a man of God or the devil’s spawn, should tremble at.” Weadick paused to assess his audience, men in straw hats and women fanning themselves in the heat. “And that is a woman!” The crowd roared and Percy blushed, and on that cue a woman rode into the infield on a golden palomino. She had a white hat too. Dark-haired, with a crooked smile, the prettiest woman Michael had ever seen.
“This is my wife, Mrs. Flores LaDue, currently ranked the world’s most accomplished horsewoman,” Weadick bellowed to great applause. “She will commence to astound you with her skills.”
At the north end of the field targets had been set up, rusted heart-shaped metal plates mounted on stakes. Flores pranced her horse and took off her hat and waved it to the crowd. She disappeared from Michael and Stanford’s view and they raced around the beams and ducked under the crossbars trying to relocate her.
“I suggest, gentlemen, that now is not the time to get up and stretch your legs,” Weadick announced. “You want to be as still as a mouse around a woman with a loaded gun!” The crowd cheered as Flores produced two pistols, spinning them on her index fingers. Michael watched her, his sightline between a large man and his slender wife who had left space between them, out of habit perhaps. The pistols spun and caught the sun, and Flores gave her horse a dig with her boots and it began to canter. She took one of the pistols and aimed and fired at a metal heart and it fell with a thud. Flores dashed by and Michael and Stanford scrambled until they could see her again, Michael almost panicked at the loss of this extraordinary vision.
The two brothers ran to where the bleachers ended and peeked out, risking discovery to see Flores. But everyone else was mesmerized too. She turned around backwards in the saddle and took off her hat, waving it. With her other hand she drew her pistol, fired, hitting another heart. Then she holstered the gun and spun around in the saddle, tapping her hat on tight and prancing by the grandstand with that crooked smile.
Flores trotted up to Weadick and Percy.
Weadick addressed Percy in his stage voice. “Now you are a man of God, sir, and you will be happy to know that it is God Himself who guides the hand of my lovely wife.” Percy’s white shirt was wet through under his black wool suit, as if he’d been baptized in a river.
Michael retreated under the bleachers and found a sightline behind two fat men. Another man entered the ring, carrying a hat, holding it upright with both hands as if he was carrying a cake. Sitting in the hollowed crown of the tall white hat was an overripe melon stained with its own juices. The man placed the heavy hat on Percy’s head, who finally found his voice. “This has gone far enough. I demand—”
“Where is your faith, man?” Weadick boomed to the crowd. He had the solid psychological insight of the showman, and could sense that Percy, this small-eyed, plump man, was not popular.
“Is he a true man of faith?” Weadick asked. The crowd roared its response; a dozen sentiments that blurred, some calling out Percy’s name, and one yelling “Shoot the bastard!”
Michael recognized Percy from his one visit to church with his mother. It was a small Methodist congregation that met in a white church in the foothills. Most of it had been confusing, Percy describing the terrible things that awaited those who strayed, but Michael had enjoyed the sermon. There wasn’t a shortage of action in the Old Testament. Afterwards, while they rode back, Michael asked questions about God and his mother answered as best she could and then they rode in silence. And now here was Percy, looking damp and sacrificial.
Flores dismounted and gave her horse a pat on the rump and it trotted obediently back to the north end of the infield and through the exit. She walked over and planted a kiss on Percy’s soft mouth and again the crowd roared.
“Reverend,” Weadick yelled, “if God has decided to call you home, at least you can’t say you never been kissed.” Percy was at the threshold that divides liquid from solid, melting in the August sun. He imagined himself a wet essence given up to the Lord. Water pooled in his shoes and flowed down his chest like spring runoff. I will be water, he silently chanted, and when Delilah in the red boots squeezes the trigger, the bullet will pass harmlessly through me; He will not forsake me.
Flores marched off an exaggerated ten steps and winked when she turned around. Michael felt that the wink was for him, that she could see him with her sharpshooter eyes, see between the fat men whose dark suit jackets had been removed and were now damp heaps on their laps. She could pull out that gun and fire a bullet through the straw hat of the man in the first row, between the two fat men and between the faces of Michael and Stanford, faces that were only a bullet width apart. They would feel its heat but be untouched, a kiss almost, delivered to the ten-year-old boy and his twelve-year-old brother, a complicit kiss that implied confederacy and love.
She drew her gun and spun it around her finger and then lifted it slowly, as if it was being pulled by an invisible mechanical device, or guided by the hand of God. It stopped, steady as an April rain, levelled at Percy. The power of speech deserted him and his God, and he was once again the plump boy who was bullied in the one-room schoolhouse that held every age, the big, mule-brained farm boys tormenting him, and now he worked hard each Sunday instilling fear into them, using the Old Testament as a club, threatening famine and locusts.
The sound of the bullet hitting the ripe melon, the explosion producing a shower of juice, brought a collective exhalation from the crowd, then a roar. “You missed!” one of the fat men yelled, laughing and stamping his heavy boots, his musty wool pants shaking in front of Michael.
When the dramatically moustached face of the Royal North-West Mounted Policeman appeared suddenly through two slats of the bleacher seats, he and Stanford bounced under and over the beams like ferrets, launching themselves out into the sun and racing for the woods. They sprinted down a path and slid into some brush in an aspen grove, breathing hard and smiling crazily.
Over the next four years, Flores LaDue appeared to Michael, beckoning in half-dreams, riding toward him with her crooked smile, a smoking gun in one hand. She touched his hair, kissed him, and whispered My sweet angel. And now here she was again, her image blurred on the handbill, standing beside Weadick, and the news they were going to present the Greatest Show on Earth. It would be in Calgary, and Michael wanted to be part of it. He was fourteen now, Flores still his only love.
Stanford brought the handbill up to their bedroom. It was folded into a tiny square and tucked into his sock, contraband, and he carefully unfolded it on the bed. Near the bottom, it read, “Calling All Indians!” Flores and Weadick wanted an Indian parade.
“You think that means us?” Michael asked.
“I figure it does. We tell them we’re eighteen if they ask.”
“Who’s going to ask?”
“I don’t know. Anyone. If anyone asks.”
“I don’t look eighteen.”
“Go to sleep.”
Michael had been having the same dream for a week, submerged in the creek, which was infinitely deep, looking up through the clear water at the world shimmering there without him.
“Do you have dreams, Stanford?”
“I suppose everyone does.”
“You’re in them?”
“Sometimes.”
“What happens in them?”
Stanford was quiet for a minute. “There are dreams I can’t remember,” he said, “and when I wake up I feel like something important isn’t being told to me.”
“What do you think they’re trying to tell us? The dreams.” Was he was going to drown?
“The spirits guide us in our dreams. It’s the only time they can talk to us. Go to sleep.”
“Am I going to drown?”
“No one is going to drown.”
“Do you remember him, Stanford?”
“Who?” Though he knew who Michael was talking about.
“Dad.”
“I remember him walking around outside with the dogs.”
“Why do you suppose he did it?”
“I guess he got tired of something.”
“You think it was us.”
“He didn’t spend enough time with us to get tired. I think he was just worn out.”
Michael wondered how anyone could get that worn out. He was glad it hadn’t been him who found their father.
Stanford and Michael sat in the brush thirty yards from the Cochrane train station, waiting for the men to load up milk, cream, and beef to haul into Calgary. Stanford pointed to a boxcar with an open door. “That one there,” he whispered. “Follow me when I go.”