He squeezed my hand as we walked.
Zita sent her children home, I said. He nodded.
I LOOKED up and saw the Hag in the doorway again. I felt a snap between my eyes and I had to dig my nails into the palms of my hands to keep from screaming at her.
It’s called a privy because that’s where people go to have some privacy, I said.
Did your father teach you to speak that way?
No, ma’am.
If you’re done at that thing, empty it out and wash up and come help me shell some corn.
I have to be goin’, ma’am.
Well, when you are done goin’, come help me.
So I lingered as long as I could and then came in to help her. I felt that was my duty since she had let me stay the night.
It’s fifty miles to Lethbridge, she said when I came in. Should take you a day or a day and a half depending on your pace. From there you can cross the border at Coutts into Sweetgrass. What’s your horse’s name? she asked. She was looking out the window.
I don’t know.
She’s not yours, then?
She’s mine.
Then why doesn’t she have a name? A pretty brown thing like that a person wants to name.
I took her from someone. He knows her name.
You stole that horse.
He was whipping her. He whipped her with a chain and then he left her outside a bar and I took her away. He didn’t deserve a horse.
She sighed and crossed herself. Did your father know?
No. He was already sick.
And the man did not come after his horse?
He came after her. I sent him away.
Your father was weak for horses too, she said.
The corn was all shelled. I looked over her shoulder at my horse. She’s more black than brown, I thought, with eyelashes long enough to make a breeze.
Am I pretty? I said before I could stop myself. As if to show how strange my query, a hummingbird paused at my eye level just outside the window, attracted by the heavy purple blossoms of cut jasmine in a vase on the sill. The woman looked at me. Behind her, on a shelf nailed to the wall, was a porcelain portrait of the Sacred Heart. Beside it hung a Catholic calendar with all the ferial and Ember days, the fish days and the feast days, and the seasons marked. I felt hot, afraid. I looked down on my shaking hands.
No, she whispered sadly. Her face was transparent with pity. You’re not pretty. Your mother wasn’t pretty either. But, she said and sighed, I heard that she loved animals too. Once she caught a man whipping a mule and she rode over to him and told him to stop. He cracked the whip at her head and sent her hat flying into the dirt. She drew a rifle on him and said, You put that back where you found it. And he did.
How do you know that story?
The woman is famous. Everyone knows one thing about her.
I don’t.
Well, now you do, she said. You should go home. She’s probably long gone.
I promised him.
Yes. She nodded and sighed. She moved to a drawer under the counter and drew out a folded garment. She held the shoulders and let the rest fall until I could see it was a dress of black crepe with a high neck and buttons to the waist.
Take this, she said. Wear it when you tell your mother that the man she gave her child to is dead now.
I RODE away with the dress in my side-pack. It began to rain again. I listened to the water in the creek winding beside us, mumbling and gurgling in harmony with my stomach. My hat kept slipping over my eyes. I took it off, shook off the water and kept it on my lap. The raindrops threaded down my cheeks like tears. In the hours that passed I began to hear voices, the Hag saying, Yes, I nearly was your mother, didn’t you know? The man on the trail saying, She’s living, moving, humping bile! My father saying the Rosary, asking for the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the flesh. I heard beads clicking as they rolled against one another. After a while the voices were speaking together and I started talking to my horse to drown them out.
I don’t know why but in the middle of the night I put that black dress on and lay on the ground in the grass, watching the stars fall. The heat from my fire was almost gone. I was waiting for the last embers to die. My horse was asleep.
A voice said: I took on everything that happened, as if I wanted it just the way it happened. That was my trick. That was a good trick.
I turned my head. I did not know the voice but I knew who it was. I’m dreaming you, I said, although there was no one there that I could see. There was nothing but smoke from the broken fire and a strange smell of whisky.
Yes, the voice whispered. When the drunk hit I threw back my head and howled. That’s when they knew to hand me a bottle and escort me from the bar. And then I walked for as long as I could, which was never very long, until I was away from them, and then I fell on my knees and I howled.
I hate you, I said. The night was already so far gone that I didn’t mind talking angry and crazy to myself. Why did you give me away? What did you think would happen to me? Didn’t you care what happened to me?
The wind blew ashes into my eyes. I felt very sorry for the girl that was me.
Go away, I said. Go away. I’ll look for you but I don’t care if I find you.
I forced myself back to my father, back into recollection. It gave me peace even in the black cold night without anyone alive to love me. I remembered how when he read to me and I was cold he would spread his much-mended, oldest, wool cassock over my sheets and tuck the black cloth all around my body. It may have been a sin for him to use his old robes as a blanket, but I knew that he could never put away in the dark dusty cupboard his first and most precious vestments. I felt a hard nut form in my chest for he was a good man, a really good man, and I could remember his voice perfectly, but for how long?
He read softly in the dark:
I intend not to be separated from my balloon until I reach the western coast of Africa. While we are together, every thing is possible. Without it, I fall back into danger and difficulty as well as the natural obstacles of such an expedition. Together with my balloon, neither heat, nor torrents, nor tempests, nor the simoom, nor unhealthy climates, nor wild animals, nor savage men, can frighten me! If I am too hot, I can ascend; if I am too cold, I can descend. I can pass over mountains; I can sweep across precipices; I can sail beyond rivers; I can rise above storms; I can skim torrents like a bird! I can advance without fatigue; I can halt without need of repose! I can soar above the sleeping cities! I can speed onward with the rapidity of a tornado, sometimes at the loftiest heights, sometimes only a hundred feet above the soil, while the map of Africa unrolls itself beneath my gaze in the great atlas of the world.
I love you.
Go to sleep, Mighty Miette. Go to sleep.
I LAY in the dirt by the trail trying to see things that were close to me, my horse, my arm, the firepit, but I could only see things that were millions of miles above. The round ceiling of stars shone through thin clouds. I wiped my cheeks with impatient hands and tasted grit in my teeth. Below the stars but far, far above everything else, Father, you were hiding. Hiding in God’s immensity. Hiding where I could not see you and where my prayers could not reach your ears.
Martha
SHE CHANGED THINGS WHEN SHE ENTERED THE room. She made the other patrons excited about the scene that might come, nervous about being the centre of a future joke, irritated by the interruption. She didn’t do anything. She ordered drinks and she drank them and in doing so she became drunk. Every few times she got odd and said odd things. She was often too affectionate, greeting strangers, hello, dear, and, hello, darling, or too aggressive, accusing bystanders of staring at her or judging her. When the temperance ladies rallied outside the Gem singing, King Alcohol is very sly; a liar from the first. He’ll make you drink until you’re dry, then drink, because you thirst!, she roared back, The spinsters will be ministers when pigs begin to fly! Then she carried a tray of whiskies into the group and offered every l
ady a glass of spirits.
Still, she was neither as amorous nor as aggressive as Bill, who drank as much or more than her on many of the same nights.
Miette
BESIDES FORKS AND TINS AND JARS, HEXAGOnal pencils riddled with bite marks, the odd piece of cotton, broken books all trampled into cart and horse tracks, I also passed the damaged coffins of three children beside the trail. The broken wood allowed a view of their dusty, wrapped bodies. One coffin, two feet long, was turned on its side and a coyote stood, pulling the cloth through the bottom. He looked up at me and then turned back to his task. My stomach twisted but I rode past. The little bones had no protection. Like the fossils of ancient civilizations the bodies of these children were too delicate, too fragile to leave a final imprint, too light even to stay in the ground.
At midday we stopped to rest. I sat cross-legged in the grass, shredding grass between my nails, making whistles of the wider blades and blowing them tunelessly. I read Jules Verne for a while, shading the pages with my body by lying on my stomach propped up on my elbows. I fantasized that lying this way I was invisible to all but the birds. I loved the chapter summaries, the way they lined up my expectations.
Thirty-Second. The Capital of Bornou. The Islands of the Biddiomahs. The Condors. The Doctor’s Anxieties. His Precautions. An Attack in Mid-air. The Balloon Covering Torn. The Fall. Sublime Self-Sacrifice. The Northern Coast of the Lake.
When my stomach growled and my elbows and neck ached I sat up and chewed on some bread so stale it cut my tongue. Antelope grazed fearlessly around me. Wild lilac blued the edges of my vision. After some time staring at the sky I saw a cloud that looked like a roast chicken so I set up a fire.
WE RODE on the long next day. Herds of wild horses watched us pass. An immense murmuration of starlings spun across the horizon. The birds were a flowing black powder, thousands together in a wave taking on the shape of one much greater thing, a hand reaching down from the sky to conduct music.
A buggy carrying a high pile of boxes and pieces of stovepipes and blankets passed us going the other way. The driver was an official-looking gentleman. His neat little body in its dark suit jolted and jostled with every bump in the road. He waved to me and I waved back.
At dusk the bats and nighthawks waltzed overhead while I unrolled my pack. I thought of doing some target practice with an empty can but did not want to waste bullets. I cooked myself some beans over the fire and enjoyed them with the corn that Mrs. Nixon had packed for me. I watched the stars light up through the woodsmoke.
I fell asleep wrapped in my blankets on the open hillside and I slept deeply until once again it rained, rained in this most arid place! I woke up being pecked by water and saw the lightning flash. I set up my tent and crawled into the darkness. In the thunder was my father’s voice, but this time I knew it was only my ache to hear him.
Martha
IT WAS 1862 AND THE CIVIL WAR WAS ON. IN Washington, on September 20th, President Abraham Lincoln wept over the body of his eleven-year-old son, dead from drinking the polluted water that ran from the taps in the White House. In Virginia City, Martha and her sisters appeared for the first time in the newspapers as a band of vagrant children, a social concern, begging door to door. When not begging, Martha hid her sisters and brothers in bushes, under wagons, wherever she could, out of sight of troopers in homespun uniforms who would not hesitate to hang vagrants, even children, with their own belts. Evenings, Martha held her mother’s hand while she lolled drunk upon the floor of the shanty. It was Martha who trod to the gambling hall to collect her father. It was Martha who slept on the floor to give an unwanted, armed guest her bed. Afternoons, she swept neighbours’ houses to earn money for food and cough medicine. Whenever she could she followed the cowboys and watched them practise throwing a rope, shooting at targets, jumping from the back of a horse onto the fleeing body of a calf. Once in a while they let her ride an old pony and help to drive the cattle home.
SHE WENT to the post office with her brother Elijah to mail a letter for their mother. They were excited for the treat of seeing bright stamps from around the world on display. The open books under glass were all from the postmaster’s collection. They bumped into each other rushing through the door, and stopped.
There was a war ad in the post office that showed Winfield Scott, a Mexican war hero from Virginia, as the Hercules of the Union slaying the Great Dragon of Secession. Scott was in his uniform, which was like a short dress with a billowing skirt. His shoulders were adorned with epaulets. His hair was crimped and neat. He wore tall shiny black boots and a belt that bore a pattern of gold leaves against a black background. He brandished a club, holding it with two hands above one shoulder. The club was the length of his upper body and roughly hewn. It was labelled Liberty Union. Scott’s expression was that of a man gravely assuming an unfortunate duty. He gazed impassively at the hydra, whose fat tail wound between his legs. Each head was a finely drawn portrait of a Confederate leader, labelled on the collar for those who might presume an accidental likeness. Floyd was bent over backwards but the other heads stared at the club. Along each of the serpentine throats that joined the human faces to one monstrous body (labelled Secession) was written a Confederate crime. The first neck read Robbery; the second read Extortion. The third neck read Treason. The fourth read Perjury. Then came Piracy, Lying, Hatred and Blasphemy.
Martha and Elijah were nine and seven, looking up at the poster, the letters they had been sent to post forgotten in their hands.
They think we’re monsters. They want to kill us, Elijah said.
Miette
FATHER, I HAVE SINNED.
I hovered behind the screen of the back door as my father took confession from Zita’s youngest, her smallest daughter, in the main room. She wore a dark blouse and leggings under a white ruffled apron dress so I knew she had come directly from the mission. She knelt on the rough wood floor behind the folding screen. A yellow medallion on a chain shone at the base of her throat. My father sat in his chair with his back to her and his arms folded across his chest, nodding.
Father, this man, she whispered. He breaks horses. He sticks to their backs like he is covered in burrs. I watched him and I had bad thoughts. Like the thoughts my sister talks about with the older girls. My brother told me to stay away from him. My brother said that this man could pull up dreams out of your stomach and make you do things. My mother does not know, Father.
I will not share your confession.
I believed him when he said he was a tamer, Father, a kind of doctor for women’s wildness. I saw him put his hand on my sister’s stomach and how still she stood. And he did that to me too; he put his hand on my stomach. But I didn’t feel still, I felt like wiggling. He rubbed my stomach and then he moved his hands away and when I thought I would cry he took my hands and stroked my fingers. He rubbed my wrists and my forearms and he started telling me my fortune. He said that I would have many lovers and I would break all their hearts. He said I would die from consumption before I was twenty. He said that only my first lover would ever reach the deepest parts of me. And somehow he ended up stark naked.
Child, Mary, you can’t be more than ten years old. You can’t even have begun to bleed?
Yes, Father, I began this summer. My brother said later that this is what the man did with every girl and he did it so often that sometimes it worked. I knew that it was dangerous to lie with him because the moon was wrong. But, Father, I had so much bad courage in the dark.
My father rubbed the heels of his hands hard on his knees as he breathed out ragged and loud. He gave her the requisite instructions for penance but when she finished he went to his bookshelf and drew off a book I had never seen before and he took money from the centre of that book and folded it into her palm.
Tell your mother I owe her this and more, he said, for helping with Martha.
The next day I listened to him argue with a man who was helping a neighbour. I listened to an argument that never betrayed it
s point and so was pointless. When the man walked away my father held onto the knot in his cincture looking like he could hurt someone. But he couldn’t.
I HAD meant to ride until the dark stopped me but a storm, and with it sudden night, forced me to set up camp while my horse pawed the ground and thrashed her head about. Snorts and the clattering of her teeth were interrupted by low, disturbed whinnies. She backed up against her reins and tried to pull free from the little tree where she was tied. When sheet lightning rendered the scene I could see that her eyes were wild, the whites bright in her face. I left my tent and stood in the cracking darkness wiping waves of water from her neck, holding her head still, blocking her when she wanted to plunge, rubbing her face and pulling her ears so she would listen to me. Long rolls of sound vibrated the earth underfoot. The shadowy tree branches waved overhead. My fingers grew stiff until I couldn’t unbend them. I slept leaning into her, starting each time she shook or swayed.
A stiff bark woke me. I shook rain from my face and looked around, straining at the darkness. My hands were numb and blue, hooked into the reins, and my arms, neck and back were full of stinging nettles. In flashes, near the sodden handkerchief of my tent, I saw a long body. I felt sick and my vision failed for a second. The curvature and the length of the figure suggested the body of a large woman. But the neck was too thick, too long. I pulled my hands free. They were useless. I crept forward and saw the graceful head, the eyes open and frozen, and the great dark gash across the cheek. My boot touched the fresh blood of a killed deer.
I shook my arms and bit my hands until they were mine again. I looped a noose around the deer’s neck and threw the other end of the rope over a high thick branch and with the leverage of another tree I hung the deer until I heard a crack and saw her overhead. I tied her off, and moved our camp as far as I dared in the dark. In spite of gratitude and hunger, I did not want to be beside a dead deer when whatever barked in the night returned for its dinner.
In Calamity's Wake Page 4