Light streamed from an east-facing window into Mary’s living room, a room that was cluttered with old newspapers, Eaton’s and seed catalogues from years ago, a loom that Mary threatened to get rid of, folded laundry, and bags of wool. Louise sank into the navy blue armchair, her long legs stretched before her. She wore black linen pants, a white blouse, and a pale blue cardigan. Her physique was well-rounded, heavier around the hips than she’d like. She kept her black hair short, hoping to mitigate the advance of the greys and whites.
Mary was a short, thin, and wiry woman. Her thick salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back and tied with a piece of string. Swaddled in a bulky red sweater buttoned to her chin and brown pants stained with grease and oil and bits of food, she sat on the maroon corduroy couch, her feet drawn beneath her. On the floor sat her ochre deerskin moccasins. The stitching around the toes was giving way, but she’d never toss them; they had been a gift from Louise.
Mary had never told Louise her age. Louise guessed there were five or six years between them. Mary, the older of the two, was probably sixty-six or sixty-seven years old.
“So, tell me again,” Louise asked, trying to suppress a smile, “how exactly did you manage to scrape almost every inch of your face and arms? You look like you’ve just stepped out of a boxing ring.”
Mary threw a ball of wool at Louise.
The two had met in town almost fifty years ago, the early 1920s, just after the First World War. Although a heady time for many, it hadn’t been that way for them. Both runaways, they were keening for a better life. At least that’s what they told each other. Mary had been in town for six or eight months, although initially she’d told Louise she was born there. They lied to each other a lot in those days, as they lied to everyone.
Mary wound a strand of blue wool over the end of her knitting needle. Knitting, she said, kept her fingers limber. The needles clicked over each other. The few things she knew how to knit — scarves, socks, mitts — she gave to her sons and grandchildren as birthday gifts.
Neither woman spoke for a time. It was often that way between them. Just to be in the other’s company was sufficient. Like a couple of old cats who shared the same house, knew of the other’s presence, but found little reason or need to interact. The simplicity of her time with Mary was a respite for Louise, a retreat from her busy life as a lawyer. As much as she enjoyed the intellectual gymnastics, took satisfaction from seeing fairness and justice achieved, it had kept her from her family, from herself, from a good night’s sleep. But her chronic restlessness and discontent she knew came from a deeper place. Elinor said Louise was like a porcupine, prickly, but if approached carefully, the barbs were kept in check. Louise knew about the barbs; they’d come into existence those first months after she’d left the reserve. Over the years they’d dulled and were slower to emerge. But they were still there, and often necessary in her law practice.
“So, what brings you out this time?” Mary asked, peering over the top of her glasses.
“You, my dear,” Louise said. “It’s always you.”
Mary laughed. “After all these years you still think you can pull that lawyerly stuff with me. Well, I’ll humour you. And while I’m doing that, why don’t you open that bottle of wine you brought? Hope it’s better than the last one you dragged out here.”
“And which one was that?” Louise asked.
“That French one. La Belle something or other. Rouge or blanc.”
“That’s not saying much,” Louise said. “You don’t remember.”
“It will come to me.”
Louise searched for the corkscrew. She couldn’t assume from one visit to the next where things were kept in Mary’s house. And it was useless to ask; Mary’s housekeeping was erratic. She didn’t live by the dictum A place for everything, and everything in its place. Mary lived alone, and as best as Louise could tell, never minded having to search for things. Louise preferred the direct route to what she wanted; all the detours in Mary’s house frustrated her. She sighed as she closed one drawer and opened another.
“It’s in the drawer to the left of the stove,” Mary said.
“Already checked that one.”
“Maybe on the back porch, then.”
Louise stepped out onto the porch, and the scent of warm earth wafted toward her. When she visited Mary at the height of summer, the fields that surrounded her house were golden with ripening wheat. A yellow-breasted meadowlark flew from the fence post at the bottom of the garden. In the middle of the weathered table constructed from half a wooden door sat the corkscrew, a cork still on the end of it.
Louise and Mary didn’t meet regularly, as in every two weeks or three months, or the third Sunday or first Monday of the month. But in the past four decades they had managed to get together two or three times a year. They couldn’t not get together. Their visits were a necessary reaffirmation, although never spoken about, of what they had shared, what they had done, more than forty years earlier. Mary rarely initiated these visits. Perhaps she was less fearful; she had less to lose than Louise.
What propelled Louise to contact Mary, she did not understand. She didn’t care or try to understand. She wasn’t one for that kind of reflection. It might be something in the news: A man lost in dense forest, found days later half-dead. A calf that had strayed from its mother, strangled in barbed-wire fencing. Or a black woman in the Deep South raped by a gang of white youths. Or it could be a change in the weather, something as simple as that. Whatever the event, it left a ping, an irritation at the back of Louise’s mind. A day or two later she’d call Mary. If it wasn’t a story in the news it was the dream, the same dream Louise had had for years. Two girls on the prairie running and chasing each other in the bright sun, their play interrupted by strong winds, dark clouds, then they are running, running to hide from the storm. Always Louise awoke in a sweat, a sense of choking, being choked, finding her own hands around her neck. That day or the following one, she’d call Mary.
Back inside, Louise twisted the foil from the wine bottle and took two tumblers from the cupboard. She only brought French wines for Mary. That’s all she’d drink. Homage to Mary’s dead father, who was French and beat Mary’s mother, a Cree Indian, until Mary threw a knife in his thigh, told him to never do it again, and ran from the house.
“What are you doing in there?” Mary called. “Planting the grape vines?”
They took their wine to the front porch. In the distance, like a mirage, grain elevators rose up like pyramids, and beyond, not visible to the women, the low skyline of Regina, where the two had met. Mary asked if Louise remembered the day they’d met. Louise said it was etched in her mind like leaf imprints in prehistoric stone.
She had come into town to shop and had almost been run down by a truck. She’d not seen it because she was looking at Mary standing outside the café: white shirt, dark skirt, braids down her back.
“I was convinced you were a woman from the reserve.”
Mary shook her head, said that wasn’t her first recollection. She went to the edge of the porch. “Damned gophers. Look at him, sitting up there in the middle of my garden like a thistle in a patch of pansies.” She crept down the stairs, found a stone, and hurled it at the tawny rodent, missing his head by an inch. “You little bugger,” she said, “you’re lucky I didn’t have my slingshot.”
“Used to be a time Indians were grateful for the little bits of meat that could be found on a gopher’s bones,” Louise said.
“Yeah, in the last century,” Mary said.
“They didn’t taste so bad. Just too little meat for a family of five,” Louise said.
The weathered wicker chair, ready for retirement, complained as Mary returned to it.
“We don’t have the same memory,” Mary said. She told Louise she saw her for the first time when she came into the café with Mrs. Scott and the two children. “The two brats,” Mary added. Everyone but Louise had ice cream. That irritated Mary even though she’d seen that kind of thing b
efore. What bothered Mary more was the way Louise was acting. Whenever the cook called out an order, the door banged, or somebody laughed loudly, Louise jumped, her eyes bugged out like a fish’s.
“I thought you were going to bolt right out of there. You’d settle down for a bit, stare at the boy, then there’d be another crash from the kitchen, a customer would shout or drop a knife, and you’d practically leap out of your chair. There was nothing I could do.”
The boy, Mary said, was a cute kid. Three or four years old, yellow hair, big brown eyes, he was making a mess, slurping his ice cream, spilling it on the table, down the front of his shirt. The girl, whom she wanted to swat, kept taking ice cream from her brother’s bowl. He cried and pleaded with his mother to make her stop. Mrs. Scott grabbed Louise’s arm, hissed something at her. Louise didn’t answer or do anything. Mary figured Louise’s English wasn’t too good. Finally, Mrs. Scott yanked the ice cream from both of the kids, pulled a handkerchief from her bag, wiped down the boy, and glared at Louise.
“I felt sorry for you. I asked the cook if he knew the woman, where she came from. He didn’t. I was so worried for you,” Mary said. “I’m not sure why. Maybe you reminded me of myself a couple of years earlier.”
Mary sucked the dregs from the bottom of her glass.
“I don’t remember any of that,” Louise said. “Must’ve been just after I’d left the rez. I was grateful they had taken me in, fed me, given me a place to sleep.”
“You mean that dirty cot in that shed without any heat, cracks between the boards big enough for a rat to get through? You would have frozen to death that first winter if I hadn’t dragged you into town. You didn’t want to come, though, did you?”
Louise swirled her wine, watched the legs of red liquid slip to the bottom of her glass. Mary loved to reminisce; Louise did not. There was much Louise wanted to forget, much that was better left alone. That other world, the world she had run from, she almost never thought or spoke of. Except with Mary. No one but Mary knew the details of Louise’s time with the Scotts. No one but Mary knew how Louise had longed to go back to the reserve, how she hated the work in the café — slinging coffee, eggs, and pork pies, washing floors, fending off crude remarks and pinches from cocky male customers, white males.
“No, I didn’t want to come with you.”
“Why?”
“Fear, maybe.”
“Fear of what? You’d never have gone to law school if you’d stayed with them. You would have been the one scrubbing those kids’ clothes as they went off to law school. What were you afraid of? You’d already done the hardest thing, which was to leave the reserve.”
They never spoke of it. What they, well, mostly Louise, had done. Louise wondered if Mary had forgotten. In Louise’s mind, the hardest thing, and far worse thing, had not been leaving the reserve.
Long summer days. The heat of a prairie sun seeping into my back, shoulders, and rump.
Fields of grasses that flowed beyond the limits of my vision.
The company and comfort of countless others of my kind.
That is some of what I knew before I came into this museum.
There are other memories, passed down from ancestors, which are less pleasant.
Trainloads of humans, sometimes we called them two-leggeds, brought to hunt us. White-faced men, jeering, yelling, shooting, and blasting at bison, over and over and over, until the poor animals were falling to the ground like leaves from a tree in a fall windstorm.
In this museum I still watch two-leggeds.
Why do they come?
The Indian woman came again. Sometimes she draws. Sometimes she only talks. Or she’s quiet. This last time I saw the change in her eyes. I’ve seen that look in the cows after they’ve lost a calf.
So, finally I determined that as the hide was not to be got off, I would content myself with the tongue, which I hoped to get out of its head somehow in the course of an hour or two.
Falling to work again, I ultimately succeeded in getting out the lingual member. To this trophy I added the tail, which I cut off as an additional evidence that I had positively slain a buffalo.
— “In the Buffalo Country,” George Brewerton,
Harper’s Weekly, September 1862
4
FromFrom the assortment she kept on her dresser, Elinor reached for the photograph of the six of them — she and Joseph, with Louise, Charlie, Le Roy, and Philip — posing in front of the Ferris wheel. An odd place for the picture, since none of them had ridden on the twirling contraption. Joseph wouldn’t permit it. He said if the Creator had meant for humans to be spinning in circles above the ground he would have given them wings or more legs and arms. In addition, Joseph thought the ride would be boring. You didn’t go anywhere; the view wasn’t any better than what he could see every day. He didn’t want to stare at a bald head or peer down the throat of a screaming teenager.
Elinor had no idea how she’d gotten the photograph. At that time they didn’t own a camera. She squinted at the picture. Was it even their family? Yes. It was the only photo she had of all of them.
There had been other children, never photographed. She’d had twelve pregnancies. Two slid from her body within weeks of Joseph’s seed swimming into her womb. Others stayed until legs and arms were formed before tearing away from her body. Her mother told her it was for the best. Either the baby was weak, a cripple, or its death was intended as a sign that something bad was going to happen in the world. Better not to come to this place. Of course, her mother was right. Two babies came early and died within days of their births. After both deaths a sickness swept through the reserve. Like a starving animal the disease ravaged the camp. Ten, fifteen died. Those who survived were left sickly and weak for months.
For years those children who had passed over to the other side stayed near Elinor. She’d hear them rustling in the bushes, see them near the fire, feel them brushing against her face when she walked over the prairie. She was never alone.
She placed her finger on Philip’s chest. Immediately, as if she’d touched a coal in the fire, the sadness shot up her arm and into her throat. He had just turned three; she didn’t know it would be his last photograph. He’d died just a few months before the end of the Great War. Louise was eleven and already a bold child; maybe she had to be. Conditions on the reserve were bad. So many were sick and there were no doctors to see them, no money for medicines. There was not enough to eat; a couple of gophers didn’t go far in a family of five.
Elinor wished Joseph hadn’t gone before her. It wasn’t supposed to be like that. Some might take comfort that he was there waiting for her, but she wasn’t one of them. Especially now she needed him. Finally, she was going to speak about what she had kept secret for so long. Why had she waited so long to tell him? It seemed she had just decided to do so and then he was dead. What did that mean?
She didn’t want to think of that time. She shoved it from her mind and thought about the good times on the rez, Joseph and his fires behind the house. The two of them poking sticks into the coals. Laughing about the guy who’d bought a horse that ran fast as the wind but as soon as it was hitched to a wagon wouldn’t move. They remembered the days when ducks, deer, and rabbit were so plentiful the hunters never came back empty-handed. And although they preferred not to, sometimes they talked about the drinking, the fights, the stupid accidents with guns and knives, and the children who died before they were five. Joseph would fuss over her. Until the day that he died, he sang to her and made jokes. They’d giggle about the old times, when they had had more energy for wandering over each other’s bodies.
Elinor returned the photograph to its place, closed her eyes, and gripped the corner of the dresser. How was she to tell Alice about the child? Her child. A child she’d not seen in decades.
She knew she was putting it off. Reminiscing and telling dreams were easier. Despite the number of years that had passed, the torment had not diminished. The memory oozed like a wound that would not cl
ose despite repeated ministrations. Now, before she went into the ground, she wanted a scab for that misfortune — or miracle, more and more she thought of it that way — in her life. She wanted the suffering to shrivel and new growth to sprout.
The windows clattered; the walls shivered, and Elinor knew that wind had passed by.
She shuffled to the spare bedroom, which smelled of linseed oil and dust, paints and graphite. Tubes of acrylic, boxes of watercolours, sketch pads, paint palettes, and the bottoms of plastic jugs bulging with brushes cluttered the table. In the absence of recent creative initiatives, it had become more like a storage room than an artist’s studio.
The painting she’d started in the spring — the view of the west of the valley — was on the easel. She’d aspired to something different from what those men had done in the earlier 1900s. What were their names? Bill? Jeffrey? Kennedy? It didn’t matter. She wanted a work that showed the presence of the Creator and the multitude of life on the land. She envisioned sweeps and curves of brilliant yellow, cinnamon, and sage green. Embedded within the colours would be wings of hawk, ears of deer and badger, wolf snouts, red triangles of wild strawberry, and the piercing ebony eyes of pickerel, perch, and snake. Here and there, subtly, there’d be a breast, a thigh, a portal, soft and moist.
She stepped back from the painting. What was there had blurred. The colours were less vibrant. There was more in her mind than on the canvas. Probably Louise was right. If she wasn’t so stubborn she’d go to a doctor and get the cataracts removed. But why couldn’t she make paintings of the valley as seen through the creamy opaque lens of a cataract? Why should it be any less valid than what was seen through the transparency of a healthy eye?
Tears in the Grass Page 2