Luna

by Sharon Butala

  “What do you mean?” Selena’s voice was low, she had never expected to hear a member of her own family question the creed that all of them lived by.

  “Tell me what you did last night,” Diane said. Caught by surprise, Selena tried to remember.

  “Hemmed Phoebe’s grad dress, helped Mark study history, watched a little tv.”

  “And the night before? And the night before that? What do you do to pass the time around here? What do you do with your life?” She was sitting up straight now, staring angrily at Selena.

  “Raise your kids,” Selena said, angry too now. “Raise them where you don’t have to be scared every minute for their lives—that they’ll get beaten up, or that your daughter will get raped. Where there aren’t so many things going on that you can’t even be a family …”

  “Oh, yeah,” Diane said, looking away, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “Family.” She was silent a moment, looking restlessly around the room, her eyes bright and hard now. “Family. Twenty-four hours a day, year after year.” She rose and went to the screen door, then turned back to Selena, who watched her, knowing her shock was showing on her face, but unable to conceal it. “I’ve got two daughters, Diane said. “Two little girls. They’re people, not just future baby-havers and housekeepers and dress-hemmers! I can see already that if we stay around here they’re going to wind up in exactly the same fix I’m in.” Selena could feel the colour rising up her neck and flushing her cheeks.

  “You’re not thinking of leaving Tony!” Diane didn’t reply. She walked to the sink, then went back to her chair and sat down. Selena kept talking, as though it were normal for Diane to be so agitated. “Where would you go? How would you support the kids?”

  “I’d go to Calgary, or Winnipeg, maybe. Maybe even … Vancouver?”

  “Are you crazy?” Selena was appalled. “Don’t you realize what it would be like? They’d both have to go into daycare, you’d have some kind of awful job that wouldn’t pay anything—you’d never see the kids, you wouldn’t know who was looking after them, or what was happening to them. You’d have nobody to come home to. You wouldn’t even have a house to live in. You’d have to live in an apartment, and they’re awful.”

  “How would you know?” Diane asked. “You’ve never been off this stupid farm.”

  “It’s not a farm, it’s a ranch,” Selena pointed out, and was immediately annoyed with herself. “Anyway, everybody knows what the city’s like.”

  Diane hates herself for getting into what feels to her like a stupid argument, but she hears the words falling out of her mouth, some part of her spinning them and spitting them out, while the rest of her sits in silence, listening and wondering and crying no, no, no—this isn’t it, this isn’t what it’s about. But what’s true is that I’m dying here, and Selena, isn’t that enough? I don’t know what it is that’s driving me, I don’t understand it and I don’t know what will satisfy this thing that’s tearing at me, but you don’t either, it’s laughable that you should be advising me, reciting your homely truths to me. Oh God to escape, if only from the platitudes that are piled up around here like barriers everywhere I turn.

  “Selena,” she said, sighing. “Look at me. I’m young. I’m only twenty-five.” But Selena saw instead the fine lines at the corners of her sister’s eyes, and the rigid tendons in her long neck, and that bright, deep light in her eyes that so dismayed her that she dropped her eyes from Diane’s. This was too much. She had never seen such intensity, she didn’t know how to deal with it.

  But Diane, looking at Selena, remembers instead the story Rhea had told her about how, when she was reaching middle age at her home on the ranch, she had cried for days and days at a time. How Rhea had said, not looking at Diane, but out across the distant prairie, there was some tragedy going on inside me, some loss so deep there were no words for it. I must have known what it was at night. I must have known it in my sleep, in my dreams, because that was always when the crying would start.

  Diane, filled with awe and sorrow at this picture, had ventured, what about Uncle Jasper? What did he say? What did he do?

  Rhea had replied, Jasper would turn away from me, angry and afraid. He’d go out and work twice as hard, hitch the team and wagon and go twice as far for a load of feed, be away twice as long, because to work harder was the only answer he knew in life, and it had to suffice for every problem.

  No, Diane thinks sadly, I won’t turn to Tony for help with this.

  Somewhere a cow was bellowing. Had it lost its calf? Selena remembered she was supposed to check on the cattle. She thought of the plants growing in her garden, could feel them brushing against her legs as she walked among them, she thought of her own dress for Phoebe’s graduation lying upstairs on the sewing machine, unfinished, its tiny, cream-coloured flowers slipping by under her fingers as she guided the silky fabric under the needle. In the hallway Cathy had pulled down one of the coats hanging on the wall and had fallen asleep on it, and on the back lawn Tammy was chasing a magpie that had been tormenting the mother cat.

  “I want … more in my life,” Diane said, and to Selena her voice sounded more puzzled than sure. “I don’t want my little girls to grow up sad, and not know why. I want them to … know … things. I… Oh, Selena, life here is so … mindless!”

  “Mindless!” Selena exploded, but Diane ignored her.

  “I want them to get out into the world, to see … life …” Her voice trailed off. “You still don’t have a new stove,” she said, fastening on this, as if it would explain everything. “Look at the floor. The vinyl’s worn out. It’s been worn out for the last five years. When was the last time you bought yourself a new dress? I bet you’re making your dress to wear to Phoebe’s grad, aren’t you? You won’t even allow yourself that much.”

  “I don’t do it because I don’t have the money …” Selena began, embarrassed.

  “Oh, I know that,” Diane said, standing again. “I know that perfectly well. It’s just that every penny you make goes back into this ranch. You go without holidays year after year, you do without any kind of frills, you don’t even have a stove to cook on that works right. Selena, what do you think the money you and Kent make is for? What do you think you’re alive for?”

  There was a long silence.

  “You don’t even know what you want,” Selena said, her voice quieter now than it had been during the whole argument. “You want some kind of a life like you see on tv, like on ‘Dallas.’ You want fancy clothes and cars and … affairs with other men. That’s all you want. And for that you’d leave your husband and ruin your kids’ lives. I really think you must be losing your mind.”

  The coffee pot on the stove bubbled sporadically. The voice of a meadowlark, carried on the wind, came to them, from a fencepost by the barn.

  “Thanks a lot, Selena,” Diane said. Selena winced at the bitterness in her sister’s voice.

  They remained like that, Selena sitting at the table, looking down at the patterned plastic top she had been looking at for fifteen years or more, Diane standing with her back to the sink, staring at the clock on the wall above the table. It ticked quietly, year after year. It had hung in their parents’ house, above their kitchen table. It had been their grandparents’. The phone rang, a long and a short, the neighbour’s ring. Tammy came in, letting the screen door slam.

  “I’m hungry.” In the hallway Cathy woke and cried sleepily. While Diane went to her, Selena rose slowly and went to the cupboard, then turned to Tammy.

  “I forgot to feed the chickens. Come on, we’ll go feed the silly old chickens, okay?” She went outside with Tammy, through the hot, dust-laden air into the coolness of the barn. Tammy stopped at the first pen, stricken at the sight of two sick calves. They stood and watched Selena and Tammy with dull eyes, their ears drooping, as Selena opened the door into the box stall. Years ago it had housed a stallion and the wood was scarred from the stallion’s hooves, even high up on the walls. Selena left the door open and Tammy came in beside he
r and helped her fill the pail by dipping the prepared feed out of the sack with an old dipper. Years ago, the clipper had been used in the kitchen, before they piped water into the house. It had always sat by the water pail, next to the nicked enamel basin, when the kitchen was still Kent’s mother’s. It comforted Selena to use the old dipper, to feel herself following in the paths of the women who had come before her. When the feed pail was full, Tammy and Selena went out, shutting the door on the scent of manure, old hay, and horse, and stood blinking in the sunlight before they started walking to the chicken coop next to the barn.

  “Here,” Selena said. She took a handful of feed and scattered it on the bare, hard-packed ground beside the henhouse. “Here, chick-chick-chick.”

  Tammy took a handful, too, and imitating Selena, called, “Here chicken-chicken, here chicken-chicken.” Chickens began to appear from under the corral railings and around the corner of the bar. Selena saw Diane come out of the house, leading Cathy, and sit down in the sun on the steps. Selena glanced down at Tammy, who had taken her hand, and thought how much she was beginning to look like Diane.

  It’s a shame Diane doesn’t keep chickens, she thought. How is Tammy supposed to learn. She watched the chickens pecking and ducking in that self-important, funny way they had. I like my chickens, she thought. The women in my family have always kept chickens, and sometimes ducks and geese and even turkeys. A place doesn’t look like home without some birds pecking around, a rooster crowing now and then. It didn’t seem possible to her that Diane would really leave.

  When they had finished throwing the feed, she and Tammy put the pail away and went back toward the house.

  But surely, Selena was thinking, watching Diane playing with Cathy in the sunshine, surely this is what a woman’s life is? Feeding the chickens, playing with your babies, weeding the garden, just enjoying the summer weather. Diane said, as if she had been rehearsing this, “I wish I could be like you, Selena. Please don’t think I don’t appreciate what you are. But somehow … all of this just isn’t enough for me.” She frowned at Selena, searching her sister’s face for something Selena knew somehow she couldn’t find. “Don’t you start hating me.”

  Before Selena could reply, she had been frozen by surprise at this last comment, Diane had stood up, picked up Cathy, and was going back inside. By the time Selena entered the kitchen with Tammy close behind her, Diane had gathered the diaper bag and was in the hall, going toward the truck parked at the front door. Selena and Tammy followed Diane from the sunshine, through the dark house, and out into the sunshine again. She helped Tammy open the truck door and get in next to her sister.

  “Diane,” Selena pleaded. “Think about going away with Tony for a week or two, won’t you?” Diane didn’t reply. For a moment she stared straight ahead, her jaw set, then slowly she turned to Selena. For a moment Selena couldn’t look away, Diane’s large, dark eyes held hers. There was an expression Selena hadn’t seen before and that she didn’t understand, as if Diane were asking her something, only Selena didn’t understand the question, never mind what the answer might be, or if there was an answer. Finally she jerked her eyes away and looked down, putting both hands on the truck door as if for support. “At least go see Rhea,” she said, and then wondered why she had said Rhea.

  “All right, Selena,” Diane said, and she drove away with Tammy waving a frantic good-bye out the window.

  Selena was upstairs working at her sewing machine in the bedroom when she heard Kent drive in and stop the truck at the front door. She shut the machine off and hurried down the stairs. He was hanging up his good hat, and turned to look up at her as she descended.

  “Did you check those cows?” He sounded a little tired, she thought.

  “I forgot,” she admitted, dismayed. He lifted his beat-up straw hat off the peg, set it on his head, and went into the kitchen. “But I did get the horses in,” she offered, hurrying down the rest of the stairs and following him into the kitchen. “They’re in the barn.”

  “Good,” he said. He went to the sink and ran water into a glass and drank it. “How come you forgot to check on the cows?” he asked amiably, turning to her.

  “After I watered the horses and filled the mangers, I came in to sew for a few minutes while they ate, and I just forgot.” She shrugged ruefully. “I had things on my mind.”

  “What things?” he asked, grinning up at her, as if she could never have anything serious on her mind. He was sitting down by the back door now, pulling off his good boots.

  “Diane,” she said.

  “Poor Tony,” he said. “Never marry a pretty girl, I always say.” He set his good boots neatly side by side next to the chair.

  “Thanks a lot,” Selena said. He looked up, surprised, and laughed. “Get me my boots, okay?” She went into the hall and brought back his worn riding boots.

  “So, what’s new with Diane?”

  “I think she might really be going to leave him.”

  Kent bent and began to pull on his old boots. After a moment’s silence, he said, his voice muffled, “He’d be better off without her, if she won’t settle down and pull her weight.” Selena felt heat rising in her face. She wanted to say, this is my sister we’re talking about, but she didn’t, remembering how Kent had allowed her to keep Diane with them for years, how he had fed and clothed her as if he were his own child, never complaining about the expense.

  “It’s never all one person’s fault,” Selena said. “It takes two to tango, you know.” She kept her voice casual.

  “She’s lazy,” he said. “It must have something to do with losing her mother when she was so young. And let’s face it, your old man wasn’t that hard a worker. I know you did your best, but she don’t do nothing to help Tony.” He stood up, went to the hall and came back carrying his light summer jacket while she stood silently, leaning against the counter, watching his lean back, remembering, too, that it was Kent who paid for Diane’s wedding, when her dad was so sick that they couldn’t even tell him Diane was getting married.

  “Come on, then,” he said, putting his arm across her shoulders. Their eyes met and for a second she thought he was going to kiss her. But no, they walked outside together, she catching her straw hat from its peg and setting it on her head as they went by the door. They curried their horses and saddled them, let them out of the barn, through a gate which Kent opened and closed behind them. They mounted then, still not speaking, and Selena waited while Kent, holding his horse steady, looked off into the distance ahead of them, to the right, and to the left.

  They rode north, stopping while Kent opened another gate, leaving this one open behind them. It was late afternoon and the wind was still fairly strong. It made the horses nervous and hard to manage. Selena was anxious to get into the hills near the northern edge of their lease where they would settle down. She had been as big a daredevil on horseback as anybody until she was pregnant with Phoebe and then all the years when her children were young she was nervous about riding, and did only as much as was required of her. All the women, at least most of them, were that way, they laughed about it among themselves, and yet they were faintly ashamed. It was only in the last couple of years that Selena had begun to enjoy riding again. Still, she knew her days of riding only half-broken horses and of taking chances on horseback without even noticing it were over. In a way she regretted it, but she accepted what seemed inevitable.

  Selena liked riding with Kent beside her. He talked to her when they were riding in a way he rarely did otherwise. It was as if, out on the prairie on a horse, in the wind and under the sun, he lost some of his reserve, and for once the words flowed freely.

  “I been thinking,” he called to her, and she turned her head to hear him over the wind. “Our hay crop looks really bad, there won’t be nearly enough feed to last the winter, and the way things are, the calves are gonna be pretty light this fall. I been thinking I’d like to try to feedlot a liner load of ‘em—just try it out, you know.” Selena listened, thinking. T
his had been her father’s business, too. She knew it pretty well.

  “That won’t leave us much income to get through the winter.” He nodded, riding on through the short, dry grass. She called again, “How are we going to pay the feed bill if we do that?” They rode on, calling to one another, or not speaking, listening to the prairie noises they could hear during a lull in the wind: the whistle of the occasional gopher, the cry of a hawk. The day was still, the sun cast a burning heat over the land that even the wind could barely dull.

  At the waterhole they found cows grazing, or lying motionless, except for their moving jaws, while their calves ran and played in the grass around them. They stopped and Selena began counting.

  “How many?” Kent asked.

  “I get eighteen cows, eighteen calves,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  They began to ride again at a walk, no longer talking, both of them watching and listening. Horned larks hopped out of their way, Selena saw a duck’s nest hidden in the grass, and once Kent stopped, dismounted, and bent to pick up a buffalo horn, which he stuffed into his saddlebag. They crested a hill and then another one. They were riding down it when Kent abruptly pulled up his horse and pointed toward a cow standing a hundred yards apart from the cluster of cattle they were approaching. Her head was down, her ears drooped, and her tail was a dark green, dripping mess.

  “She’s the one lost her calf after that last February blizzard,” he said, and Selena relaxed. One lost calf they wouldn’t have to look for. “She’s pretty sick,” he said, after watching her a moment. “We’ll have to take her back with us.”

  Off to the east a calf was bleating, its voice fading, lost in the wind, then growing louder. Without speaking, they touched their horses and rode in the direction the sound was coming from, passing through a deep draw where the grass was tall and thick, and emerging into a dried-up slough bottom. On the far side of the slough a young coyote raised its head, then disappeared at a slow lope around a hill. A calf approached them, walking slowly, raising its head every few steps to bleat beseechingly.