by Patrick Lane
There was one bunk in the row that had stopped him dead. A shiver had run up Joel’s arms when he saw a bear skull on a shelf. A man who would kill a bear for his skull alone was the worst kind of man to Joel. He believed men who hunted for trophies had an illness in them. His father had always told him such men were weak. They needed to kill to prove their manhood. When Joel was fourteen he had sat in a meadow high above the Arrow Lakes and watched a grizzly bear sow feed her two cubs. She was no more than thirty feet away. When he saw her he fell to his knees and leaned back on his haunches. The cubs were yearlings, spring bears, and one to each great breast. She knew he was there and did not mind him. He stayed long after she left, the cubs playing, their squeals and mock growls a joyful noise as they stumbled and bumbled into the bush after her. Whoever slept in the bunk with the bear skull Joel knew he wouldn’t like.
After Art had dropped off the boots and left Joel had gone out, sat on the back stoop, and taken the boots off. He took out the hunting knife he’d arrived in the village with and carved his toenails back. The blade’s homemade scabbard was from the hide of a mountain caribou he’d shot the year before he left the farm. His mother had canned the meat, a farmer down the road tanning the hide. When he put the boots back on his toes still cramped against the hard, steel-cupped leather, but having cut the nails close he knew the toe-ends would callous up.
The boots didn’t bother him much anymore. The dull pain he felt in his cramped feet was part of who he was now, a sawmill worker, a man. His canvas pants were held up by a worn belt slipped through the three surviving loops, new notches punched by a nail, the drooped leather tongue hanging twisted at his waist like a dried-out roadkill snake. The denim shirt on his back was worn, its cotton threads cross-hatched white on stone-bruised blue. Like the boots, the shirt was too small for him, the frayed cuffs high up his wrists, three buttons at the breast left, the rest gone, his scarecrow arms sticking out, cords of spare muscle taut. The sunburned skin on his hands stretched tight over castanet bones. Around his throat was a soiled red bandana tied in a reef knot, a frayed V jutting out from under the yellow hair that hung scissor-cut upon his pipe-stem neck.
The grey stetson was pulled down on his head. Day or night, he always wore it. On the tip of the crown was a worried hole rubbed there by the fingers of the man who had the hat before him and worn even thinner by Joel’s fiddling with it. Stuck into the woven leather band were three red-tail hawk feathers he had found outside the chicken coops by the sawmill cookhouse. Wang Po had shot the hawk that spring with his antique Cooey .22, nailing the hawk’s body by the wings to the cedar wall as a warning to all who hunted the chicken yard to keep away. The stetson was an old one, a hat that had survived other heads, other hands. Joel had found it perched on a fence post alongside a road by a stump farm five miles west of the ferry landing on the west side of the Arrow Lakes. Joel figured the man who had forgotten the hat had grown tired of setting posts and stringing barbwire in a land whose shadowed forests ate at his brain, someone who had put down his rock-stubbed shovel and walked away from the solitary work, his bare head burning as he trudged the road west into the Monashee Mountains where the sun set every day.
He stopped and hunkered down by the butt of a fallen tree, the dried roots a tangled frieze between him and the stars blinkering through the trees. He stood there and remembered the day he’d walked north to Revelstoke and then the days trying to hitch a ride south into the Kootenay country, the Selkirk Mountains huge around him. He’d caught rides with two short-haul logging trucks. The road had been barren but for the occasional bear and moose, the rare cabin with no one at home for years. He’d walked most of the last ten miles to Lardeau then caught a ride down the lake to Nelson in the back of a rusted pickup. When he got to Salmo he’d turned east and found his way along the twists and turns of gravel through the Cascade Mountains to the Rockies and the Crow’s Nest Pass beyond. From there it was rolling country through the foothills to the high plains, Pincher Creek, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat.
He’d spent the next weeks wandering through small towns and ranches and farms as he drifted north, ending up in Edmonton. He arrived in the city in the first of winter, a snowstorm riding out of the mountains in mid-September. Desperate, broke and hungry, he got a job working for bed and board in the Canada Café on Whyte Avenue to keep himself from freezing. He became the café’s dogsbody, cleaning garbage cans, sweeping floors, and washing dishes in exchange for a closet in the basement, a worn blanket, and three strange meals a day. The first night there he sneaked into the kitchen and soaked the hat brim of his stetson in sugar water, dry-curling it into the shape of the cowboy hats he’d seen in the movies. He formed the crown with an oblong stone he took from the bank of the North Saskatchewan River, the stone the shape of his narrow skull. Now streaks of embedded grease ran around the band, the soak of salt leached there. The stain looked like the horizon line of hoodoo rimrock, his daily sweat in the sawmill and the yard bleeding up toward the crown, turning the salt lines black in the sun, only to find them dried-out white come morning.
The brim of the hat lay creased just above his eyebrows. It made of his face a deeper shadow than the night. Anyone seeing him on the path would have thought it was the heat in the bunkhouse that had driven him outside. That or the shard of a smoke-stained moon, a comet’s flare careening among the dim stars, some ill light that had brought him from his bed to brood along the paths that led among the cabins and trailers, the weathered shacks that squatted like belled knots of choker cable along the rutted road that cut the village in half.
The barred owl called again and he rose up to its cry, moving through the cedar fans, their thin whispers a song left wilting in the still air.
He stopped on the other side of the double-plank bridge, squatted by a clear pool, and lifted a handful of water to his mouth. The creek came down from the spring on the mountain, but it had been thinned to a trickle by the summer heat. There was one pool he liked to climb to, the glacial water rising clear from a cleft high in the alpine, a place where he could sit and see as far as the next world, mountains folding into mountains, blue following blue until they were nothing but light. He’d climbed mountains all his life. They were there was all, not obstructions, but like questions, asking.
He licked the water in his palm and remembered when he first asked Art if there was a path leading up into the high country. The first-aid man had told him he had to pass through Arnold Turfoot’s last field to get to the trail by Lost Line Creek. Turfoot’s was the last stump farm at the end of the dirt track Joel had followed from above the village. The farm was two hayfields and a fenced meadow where a horse and cow kept vigil to the sun’s rising and falling. Seven shit-splattered sheep lay in the crescent shade along the fenceline where scrub cedars swayed. Joel had walked quiet in the cover of the margin trees, not wanting to disturb the animals. If they scared then Turfoot would know someone or something was prowling the land, a bear or cougar, or a man. Joel hadn’t asked permission to cut through the fields, but Art had told him the mountain trail began just above them. He’d crossed behind a pile of stones beyond the barn and skirted the upper side of the last field by the trees. At the sound of rock scraping on rock he had looked back the way he’d come. In the middle of the field was Arnold Turfoot’s daughter.
She saw him look at her but she didn’t run like he thought she would. He turned away from her steady gaze and kept on going. When he got to the corner of the field where he thought the trail began he saw her slip behind a hollow tree not twenty feet away. She moved quiet for a girl. He wondered at her being there so close and sat down on a deadfall stump, waiting until she stepped out. He could tell she wasn’t hiding from him. It seemed she had more fierce in her than fear.
Months ago and now he was squatted by the creek staring into his open hand, Myrna on his mind, the water from Lost Line Creek drying in his calluses.
She’d stepped out and he’d watched her walk toward him through the stubble gras
s. She had a grin on her round face, a kind of happiness in her, a stunned joy.
He waited and as he did he remembered her look that time at the station when first he’d seen her sitting there on the back of her father’s wagon. She’d looked right into him and he knew even then there’d be a time.
And she did come to him that day on the mountain, the ragged edge of her dress riding up her pink legs, her hands lifting the frayed hem past her knees. He felt an ache deep down and told himself not to think about her, knowing even as he pretended not to that whatever might happen was going to be her fault for following him, her fault for lifting her skirts, for wanting anything as bad as he was. Joel had imagined being with a girl so many times before and had wondered what it would be like. He had watched animals, cattle and horses, cats, dogs, and chickens, but they were animals, not people. He’d seen his father with a neighbour woman in a field, had seen Oroville Cranmer ride his wife in their narrow bed, their outcries and thrashing. Myrna Turfoot was going to make what he did different than he thought his first time would be, but it was because she was different that he thought he could do it at all.
She was a stranger girl than any he’d known. She had a kind of happiness at everything he did with her, what she did with him, at everything they did together. A butterfly was something perfect to her, a lamb, a jay, a chickadee. She would go crazy looking at a flowered grass stem in the field. She’d tell him to look and he would, but he didn’t always see what she saw. To her it was the most perfect stem of grass that ever was. There were times too looking at a fir cone or a warbler’s lost feather that she’d be taken somewhere else. It was a place he couldn’t get to, try as he might to find it in himself. And she carried a special kind of pebble with her, a shining black stone shot with crystals. She sometimes rubbed it when she was quiet or when she was alone. He’d asked to see it once but she tucked it away in the pocket of her dress. She said her mother had given it to her when first she came to bleed. Her mother called it a waiting stone. She’d kept it for her until the day she became a woman. He’d seen Myrna singing words over it, words he couldn’t make out, whispered as they were, but the singing of them made him feel at peace with himself, with her.
That time they did it was Myrna’s first time too. He knew it was supposed to hurt a girl. It hurt animals. He’d seen it enough times, heard the scream of a cat, a queen turning on a tom and striking him after he pulled out, chickens screaming, horses, cattle. But it was strange how Myrna’s shouts and crying didn’t sound like pain. They were different than what hurting was. Just as her smiling when he fell on her white breasts after he was done.
He remembered how Myrna touched herself down there and brought up her fingers touched with blood.
“This is me,” she’d said in wonder, her tears like wet pearls on her round cheeks.
Arnold Turfoot’s daughter, Myrna, holding him tight in her pale and heavy arms. As she did most every Saturday, waiting for him in the high pasture. With her he could be who he was and not the tongue-tied boy who sat mooning in the café over Alice. Still it was Alice he dreamed about.
Joel reached down into the pool again and cupped his hands, splashing water into his face. The cold startled his skin, his eyes drawn to the slender rivulets filling the little pool. For a moment he felt like Myrna must feel when she looked at things, each small pebble perfect and alive.
He was torn by knowing Myrna, this girl with her odd beauty. When he was alone on the mountain or in his bed he wondered at what he felt for her, just as he wondered at his happiness each time he walked away from the farm. Why was he happy when he was with her when hours later he wanted to be with Alice too? The day he saw Alice getting down off the train at the station, she’d stood at the open door of the passenger car, the porter below with his hand out and his stool there for her to step down on. Imma Rotmensen was standing behind the porter urging Alice to hurry. She didn’t look frightened at where she was. What fear was there had taken place a long time ago. She looked as if the journey through her life was something she’d had to endure. Whatever wound she carried was hers alone and because it was Joel knew he’d do anything for her.
That was when Alice and Myrna became confusions in his life.
He knew from the day he first saw Alice everything would be different. He knew it like he knew trout dance and mice sing. Seeing her was like seeing light when first it spilled into the valley.
When she came to the village, he thought he wouldn’t want to be near Myrna anymore. Yet he’d climbed up to the hill farm a week after Alice arrived at the station. He lied to himself about why. He told himself it wasn’t Myrna, it was the clear spring pool high on the mountain he was going to. He told himself over and over he didn’t want Myrna to be there. He wanted to be clear of her, promising himself each night he wouldn’t go back up the mountain, but the need to lie between Myrna’s legs and feel her soft breasts had driven him again to the Turfoot fields. And once there they did what they’d always done.
He had a feeling there was something about Myrna that drew him to her besides their bodies. Part of it was her laughter, the crazy kind of joy she had. She loved things he didn’t know you could love. It could be a yellow lichen on a rock, a jay’s scream, a single chocolate lily nodding on the scree. He was undone by her touching the soft belly of a frog. No matter what he told her she found some kind of happiness in it. When he spoke of his father she told him how lucky he was to have been so hurt, because it made him the happier for being away from him. She made him feel blessed. He’d never thought his life could be that.
Whenever he’d get to the end of the upper field he’d take the red bandana from around his throat and tie it to a broken stub in a cedar tree so she’d know he was waiting for her in the clearing behind the rocks. Once he had it knotted he’d turn around and there she’d be. She would walk the edge of the field toward him, this strange, imponderable girl, unstoppable in what he knew was her want and his own need for her, his rut and hers under the sun, her wild talk after when she said she loved him.
Loved him?
He realized she must wait for him and the red bandana the whole morning, so soon would she be there. He’d never know how deep the shadows were that she hid in when she was waiting for him, only that she’d appear from out the cedars, a girl of flesh and blood, walking the pasture toward him. Each time she saw him turn to her from the rocks, she lifted her dress, her heavy legs mottled against the meadow stubble. She wore nothing underneath, the blond hair at her groin a sudden light flaring against her pale skin.
Her nakedness stunned him each time he looked at her. Myrna wasn’t Alice. Each time he looked at Alice at the back of the store she was broken into rectangles by the pig-wire nailed across what could be called a window and wasn’t, there being no glass. The Alice he saw lying under her covers, the blanket pulled down off her shoulders, the scroll of her ear, her slender hand, each small, discrete part of her broken by the wire that separated her from him in the prison room where she lived out her nights. He had wondered what would happen if there was ever a fire and he imagined coming to her rescue, tearing the pig-wire down, ripping at the poorly-nailed boards with the axe he somehow had with him, or running into the burning store and tearing the padlock off, each possible rescue a moment where he would save her from harm.
Alice’s was an imagined body whose shape was all he had, shrouded as it was by covers. He was allowed glimpses only; the night he saw the back of her neck and her bare shoulder, the curve of her skin as it fled into her long black hair and the single mole riding on the top of her shoulder blade, a small living thing that was a part of her and he had imagined touching it and then, overcome, had fallen backward off the cedar block and landed on his back in the gravel.
What he knew of Myrna was that each time he lay with her up at the farm she overcame him entirely. The second time he had gone back expecting her to be there, but expecting her not to be there too, for why would she after what they had done? But he had climbed t
he field anyway, drawn to her, his body crying out the same as hers must have been, and when he turned she was there.
Look what I got! she had cried.
He knelt beside Lost Line Creek, the pool trembling and those four words coming back to him: Look what I got. He’d been angry at himself for being there, angry at her for saying aloud what he had thought of the long days and nights since that past Sunday. He had pretended he couldn’t see her no matter his wanting to fall like any animal upon her.
“I’m down here,” she’d cried, her voice high and wild.
When he made no move to show he’d seen her, she pleaded: “Look at me.”
And then at his refusal to shade his eyes and look at her, she said, plaintive: “Please.”
There was such want in her saying that word.
He had stared past her at the trail she had taken across the meadow, the track where her bare footprints had disturbed the dew in the mountain shadows of the grass.
And then he looked at her.
There was such an odd and terrible smile on her face, a smile he’d never seen before on her or anyone, the soiled hem of her dress held high in her clenched fists, and saying through her tiny, stuttered teeth: “Look at me!”