Joseph would wait. He’d understand.
37
Stones and gravel, dry grass and weeds crunching beneath their feet, Louise and Mary strolled along the grid road for a quarter of a mile. The mustard crop on their right was a swath of bright yellow; the wheat on their left a buff gold. Mary said she loved the smell of a truckload of wheat kernels. She’d had a friend once who worked in a grain elevator. A dusty place, bad for his lungs, but the scent of the grain was intoxicating. At the end of the workday, he took the scent home with him, on his overalls and shirt, in his hair, inside his belly button.
Where the crops ended and the prairie began, they passed a small, weathered storage building that leaned so far to one side Louise imagined that the next deer or steer that rubbed against it would send the thing to the ground. They hooked onto a narrow trail that had seen more hooves than shoes. Mary had been keen to go walking when Louise suggested it, although they both knew she might not get far. Mary said she’d be tired, but it would be a good tiredness, not the dull lethargy of sitting around her house.
“She came,” Louise said.
“Your mother was super happy, yes?”
“Over the moon.”
The trail, now inclining upward gradually, passed through a clump of chokecherry and silver-bush shrubs. They walked in single file, Mary first, her pace slowing. Another twenty steps and she stopped to suck in a deep breath. Then she was hacking so hard and for so long Louise expected to see blood. Louise asked if they needed to go back, should she get the car, but Mary was quick to shake her head and croak out a no. She wiped the wet from her eyes, took a long swallow of water. She said she was curious how it had been for Louise to meet the woman who was supposedly her half-sister.
“It’s an odd thing,” Louise said. “I remind myself that we both started in the same place, came from the same womb. I want to have warm feelings, I think I should, but I’ve had nothing to create those feelings. I’m not like Mom. I haven’t spent my life yearning to meet this person who had been taken from me.”
“Did you like her?” Mary asked.
Louise kicked at a stone, sent it skittering over the ground. “I didn’t not like her. She wasn’t rude or demanding. She was interested in hearing about her mother’s life, where she had come from. But it was always in the back of my mind how she had come to be. What my mother had endured.”
“That needn’t make Victoria any less lovable. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t ask for it.”
“True. It seems she had a far easier life than my mother, father, LeRoy, me … you.”
“How so?”
“She lived in the white world. Very separate from the Indian world.”
“You make it sound so simple. White is good; Indian is harsh and dirty.”
“Have you been living under a rock? It’s a fact. If you could choose to be white or Indian in this country, which would you rather be?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?” Mary said. “I was mostly interested in your mother. She can die in peace now.”
Almost, Louise said to herself. She’d been working up to talking to Mary about the past, what the two of them had done.
They came out of the clump of shrubs, pushed on a little farther until they were near the top of the rise. Mary stopped again and crouched down. Louise suggested they go back. Mary said they were almost there and that this might be the last time she’d get to the valley. She said she wanted to feel the wind on her face one more time. She hummed a song Louise knew and hadn’t heard in years.
“Down in the valley, the valley so low, hang your head over, hear the wind blow …”
They strolled the final distance. A memory fragment slipped into Louise’s awareness — dry summer heat, flies buzzing, swallows darting, she and her brothers and father at the lake. Le Roy was always scared to swim, but Louise and Charlie rushed in. Her father would dive underwater, pinch their toes, and ask them if they had all ten; the fish were hungry that day.
Mary took hold of Louise’s hand as they drew close to the viewpoint.
“You’ve been a good friend,” Mary said.
“No better than you have been to me,” Louise said, squeezing Mary’s hand, gently, careful not to put too much pressure on her lumpy, arthritic knuckles.
“She wants to know about it, Mary. She says she’ll not die in peace unless she knows that I am free of it.” Louise wished it was that simple. Even with telling her mother, she would never be free of it.
“Of course she does,” Mary said.
Carved by ice-age erosion, the gentle slopes, curves, and coulees of the valley walls gave no suggestion of its harsh genesis. At the valley floor, a serpentine stream; overhead, an endless sky. In both directions they could see for miles. It was every bit as breathtaking as the snow-capped mountains of the Rockies.
And the wind blew.
Mary turned her head into it, angling it upward like a dog lifting its snout to a scent. She stayed still for a long time in that one place, allowing the long curves of the valley walls, the breeze, the wafts of grass scents and dry soil to curl around her, to work their magic.
“It’s up to you,” Mary said. “I don’t think I’d want to deny my mother her last wish. But then, I never knew what my mother’s last wish was.”
Mary turned from the valley.
Louise thought her friend looked younger, her stride longer and stronger, as they started back.
38
The meeting room of the Indian Friendship Centre, a place that Louise had never been, was three-quarters full, possibly forty or fifty people staring at the five-by-five cards filled with rows of numbers. Most people were dark-skinned, black-haired, Indian, but there were a few with lighter skin and hair. Louise had one card, but her mother, a look of great concentration on her face, was playing four. Elinor said in her heyday she’d played eight or ten cards; most times she played, she won.
The caller rotated the drum full of numbered white balls.
“Under the O, sixty-five.”
“Under the B, thirteen.”
“Under the B, seven.”
Louise could not understand the appeal of bingo. It wasn’t like poker, bridge, or horseracing, all of which involved a little skill, some logical reasoning and knowledge. Bingo was simple, a child could play it. In fact, Catherine, Andrew, and Alice had loved the game. For a time, the whole family played on Saturday afternoons during the winter. Maybe that was the point of the game, its simplicity. And the camaraderie. The players against the caller and his numbered balls. Elinor had already struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to her.
Louise placed a token over the number seven, then put tokens on numbers twenty-three and fifty-six as they were called. Elinor glanced at Louise’s card and told her she needed just one more and she would be a winner. One of Elinor’s cards also needed just one more number for her to win.
Two more numbers were called and a man across the room shouted “Bingo!”
A hush of disappointment swept over the room.
“Damn,” Elinor said. But when she saw the prize — a plastic pink flamingo — she decided it was better that she hadn’t won.
Elinor spilled the red plastic tokens from her cards back into the container, placed a token in the free space in the centre of each card, and waited for the next game to begin. She waved at an overweight grey-haired man with a black patch over one eye sitting across the room.
“That’s Jerry,” she said. “Haven’t seen him in a long time, but then, I haven’t been to bingo in a long time.”
“Under the I, twenty-six.”
“Under the B, twelve.”
“I think you’ll be a winner this time,” Elinor whispered to Louise.
“How can you tell?”
“I’ve made a study of it. After hundreds of bingo games, I’ve noticed that if you start a game and the first two numbers are under letters that are beside each other like ‘B’ and ‘I’, ‘G’ and ‘O’, and you have b
oth of them, like you just did, you have a good chance of winning.”
“That makes no sense,” Louise said as she placed another token, making for three places in a row covered.
“Just because it makes no sense doesn’t mean it can’t be true,” Elinor said. “It made no sense that so many of our people died at the turn of the century, but it was true. That’s why I’ve played bingo so much. At least you get a little prize from time to time for so little effort.”
Life, Elinor said, wasn’t much different from a game of bingo. She placed three more tokens on her cards. Louise placed another. Life, Elinor said, like bingo, has its winners and losers. She nodded at Louise’s card.
“See there. You just need one more.”
The man calling out the numbers called out two more. Louise placed another token; she had a full row.
“See. What did I tell you?” Elinor said. “Shout it out. You’re a winner.”
Louise called out bingo, but not loud enough, and the caller continued pulling out white balls from his drum. Elinor waved an arm at the caller and pointed at Louise. “We’ve got a winner here.” An assistant, a tall, stocky woman about Louise’s age, checked Louise’s numbers with those that had been called, confirming that Louise was a winner.
Elinor beamed, said she was happier than if she’d won herself.
Louise’s prize was a set of six coasters with scenes from across Canada — a prairie grain elevator, white-capped mountains, Niagara Falls.
Elinor stacked her cards, said she was ready to go home.
Louise teased her mother, said she was on a roll, maybe they should keep playing.
Elinor pushed her chair from the table, said she’d let others win. She patted the shoulder of the woman next to her, waved at Jerry, and turned toward the door.
Within minutes of getting into the car, Elinor was asleep and snoring.
They drove by the train station, a grand sandstone edifice. In years to come it would be sold and converted to a casino. Louise would remark that if her mother was alive she would have been one of the first in the door.
Louise had been on edge for the past week, rehearsing what she’d tell her mother. There was no one with whom she could practise. Not even John. She would wake in the middle of the night, wander around the house, check on her mother, determine that she was still breathing, and tell herself she must do it the next day. The next day would come and go. Through some quirk in her reasoning, she’d decided that she held the power to her mother’s continuance, that once she told her mother what she and Mary had done, her mother would die. At the same time, she was terrified her mother would die before she had honoured her final request.
Louise pulled into a park at the perimeter of the city. Across the road the prairie ran without interruption as far as the eye could see; in the near distance the airport, and beyond that a grain elevator. She turned off the car and switched to a radio station that played classical music. She was enjoying Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the “Spring” movement, and watching a red-haired three- or four-year-old boy chase after a puppy when Elinor awoke. She asked if Louise had won yet, where were her bingo cards. Then she righted herself and said the flowers were lovely. She said she remembered a time when there had been no airport, just a few buildings and no trees. She took hold of Louise’s hand and asked if she was ready to tell her. Louise squeezed her mother’s hand, pointed to the bench near the flower garden, and suggested they sit there.
“You might have to carry me.” Elinor chuckled. “Keeping track of all those numbers and letters hasn’t left me with much energy. I’d like to be near the flowers, near beauty, while I’m hearing something ugly. I’m assuming what you want to tell me isn’t pretty.”
Louise shook her head. “Not very pretty.”
In the short distance between the car and the bench, her mother’s feather-light body squeezed against her own, the scent of tobacco, the tickle of her mother’s hair against her cheek. Louise’s legs claimed their own authority, refusing to move quickly, creeping over the asphalt like oil or molasses. With each step the bench seemed to shrink from her. Each step took her farther, not closer. Despite her mother’s insubstantial weight, Louise’s arms were burdened and stiff. She settled her mother on the bench and returned to the car for a blanket. She tucked it around Elinor’s legs and over her feet. She wished she’d brought a Thermos of tea and some cookies. She sat on her mother’s left.
“Bring me one of those gladiolus,” Elinor said.
“They’re not supposed to be picked,” Louise said. “If everyone picks one there will be none left.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Elinor said.
Louise looked around; she didn’t see anyone. “What colour do you want?”
“Red, of course.”
Louise chose a stalk with several red flowers still in bloom. She bent the stalk, twisted it one way and then the other, but it didn’t break away. The stem was at least a half-inch thick; she needed a knife. Her mother seemed oblivious to her struggles. Louise scanned the area for other visitors, then bent over and bit through the stalk. It was stringy and woody, bitter tasting. She spit out the pith and took the flower to her mother.
“Thank you,” Elinor said. She drew a finger around the thin edge of a petal and did the same with the flower beneath it. She poked at the stamens, rubbed the dark dust between her fingers. She shoved the flower at Louise, told her it was time for truth-telling.
“You can’t tell anyone,” Louise whispered.
“Where I’m going, everyone knows everything and everyone is speechless,” Elinor said.
Louise leaned close to Elinor. She told her about the Scotts, the young children, and the wife who was pregnant. She spoke about how hard she worked from morning until night, washing and mending clothes, hauling water, cooking meals, feeding the chickens, weeding the gardens. The chores were endless. During a trip to town with the family, she had met Mary and the two became fast friends. Mary, Louise said, had more freedom than her and came to the farm when she could.
Louise twirled the gladiolus in her hand. She was aware of the tension across her chest, in her belly. The next part of the story was less easy to speak of.
“In the last weeks of the pregnancy, when Mrs. Scott became sickly, Mr. Scott started paying more attention to me,” Louise said. She ran her tongue over her lips, stretched out her legs. “Do you really need to know all this?”
“It’s not that I need to know any of it,” Elinor said. “You need to speak of it. That’s what is important.”
Louise cleared her throat.
“So … he’d stroke my hair … rub my chest.” She paused. “My breasts.” There were prickles on the back of her neck at the thought of it. “He’d come to my bed most nights. I wasn’t getting any sleep and the work never let up. In the midst of all this, Mary arrived. Somehow, I think because I was exhausted and frantic, I managed to tell her what was going on. That I’d propped a shovel against the door to keep him out, slept with a knife under my pillow. Mary said he wouldn’t give up. White men thought Indian women were theirs for the taking; that I would be the next one to get pregnant.
“I was terrified,” Louise said. “I didn’t want a baby. Not then, not with him. Mary said the only way he’d leave me alone was if I ran away … or killed him.”
Grasping the edge of a blossom between the tips of two fingers, Louise rubbed her fingers incrementally back and forth over the flower’s thin flesh. The satiny texture was momentarily soothing.
“Some choices,” Elinor said. “Better odds with bingo.”
“Mary said if I ran away he’d come after me. It would be worse; I’d never be free.”
Elinor pulled the blanket up to her chin. “Freedom is good. We all long for that. Freedom from something. Freedom from someone. Freedom to do something. Freedom from ourselves. There was always some kid running away from that school. A few made it. We all cheered for them.”
A tour bus pulled up across from them
. Passengers disembarked. Some headed toward the gardens, swarming over the trails and down to the stream. Others lingered at the bus, waiting for the driver to open the luggage compartment.
Louise squeezed her fingers into her knees. One of the bus passengers was shouting, waving a fist, pacing up and down the road while the driver rummaged in the luggage compartment. Louise shifted her body so she didn’t see what was going on.
“I prayed Mr. Scott would lose interest in me, find some other woman. I thought about telling Mrs. Scott, but she was in no shape to hear anything like that. I was so tired I couldn’t think straight. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if he had his way with me. Then I remembered what Mary said; I didn’t want a baby. I talked to Mary some more. I can’t believe I did what I did. I was desperate. Mary said she had some herbs. She said they were powerful; they would work quickly. I put the herbs in his lunch the day he was going out to mend fences. A neighbour found him the next day. That was forty-six years ago. July eighth, 1923. I felt horrible leaving Mrs. Scott pregnant, and with the two little ones, but I couldn’t stay on after he died. I was afraid I’d tell her what I had done.”
Elinor took the gladiolus stalk from Louise. She stared at it quietly for a long time. An elderly couple settled on a bench near them. He took her out of her wheelchair, laid a blanket across their laps. They were holding hands and laughing. An ant crawled onto the toe of Louise’s right shoe, wiggled its antennae, turned around, and went back the way it had come.
Louise glanced at her mother.
Elinor patted Louise’s hand. “I am sorry. It is a terrible thing to take another’s life. I should tell you to go to the police. That would be the proper thing. You know that yourself. But I don’t know what good it would do anyone now. Not speaking the truth is also a terrible thing. It always corrupts. It’s like a worm burrowing in a tree, making things rotten in the core.” She steepled her fingers, brought them to her lips, and closed her eyes.
“I thought a lot about telling Father,” Louise said.
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