“I’m sorry, Rosie.”
“No. No don’t ever say that. If you apologize then you did something wrong and I can blame you, and I don’t ever want to blame you. It wasn’t you. All you did was ask me to put on my little sister’s red dress and go play in front of the church. He did the rest. When you came with the camera you saved me from him. It wasn’t your fault for what he done.”
“I’m sorry, Rosie, I’m sorry because I didn’t think you would get there so quick. By the time I broke into the school and got the camera and got back, well . . . ”
“But you did get back, and he saw you with the camera, and he never touched me or any other kid on this reserve again. I don’t blame you Ben. I’m proud of you. You took on a priest and beat him. You forced him off the reserve and now I find out the camera was empty. Well, in a way that’s a good thing. Nobody will ever see my shame.”
Ambrose Whitecalf never went to university along with the others, his brothers, his classmates. Red dutifully finished grade twelve, honoured his parent’s wishes, attended the graduation ceremony that was for them, not him. He didn’t care. It wasn’t important. It simply marked the end of an era. Graduation was the signal of freedom, freedom to go back to the land, to enjoy the earth.
Red was law-abiding. But it was his law that he abided. Red’s law wasn’t much different than that written in criminal codes. The principles were the same. Respect others, take care of your family, don’t interfere. Red’s law imposed upon him a duty to help anyone who asked. He had no desire to change the world, not even to push the Americans back across the old border. They were part of a world that had no impact on him; they didn’t matter. Their rules and regulations and imposed security were meaningless in the forest.
Their economy was not Red’s economy. He cut a bit of firewood for people who still burned firewood, took the bit of money they gave, sold a bit of fish and a bit of moose meat occasionally. Sometimes in good years he sold some of the rabbits he snared to people who remembered eating rabbit but were too busy trying to earn a living to take the time to go to the forest, cut a few young tender pine and scatter them around until the rabbits came to feast. He pitied and loved those people, the ones who remembered how it was, the ones who smiled at their memories as they reached for the stringy meat that would go into their soup. They paid with big, happy smiles, not caring that the price per pound, if calculated, would bring the price of rabbit above that of beef. They weren’t buying meat; they were buying memories.
It was gasoline that forced Red into the economy, gasoline for the chainsaw, for the truck, for the boat to go lift the net. If Red did not have to buy gasoline, his life could be a whole lot simpler. Everything he needed for a good life was in the forest; food, heat, shelter. Gasoline was his prison, his captor.
Red was completely unsophisticated and loved it. The problems and complications of modern society did not touch him, did not enter into his analysis of any given morning. He woke, made a pot of coffee for himself and a kettle for Lorraine’s tea when she got up. His day began with a prayer, usually outside, a simple “Thank you for today, Grandfather.” Then Red would look around to see what needed doing or what the day was best suited for.
He was getting good at predicting weather, watching the sky for those subtle changes, those markers that he recognized — low clouds in an arc above the eastern horizon always meant that the weather would be warming. Sky colour held meaning beyond the red sky at night, red sky in morning cliché. There were also shades of blue, variations near the sun or moon and an encyclopaedia of cloud forms.
Today, Red decided, would be a good day to stay close to home, help Lorraine with the little things around the house, knowing that by noon she would be chasing him out, sending him somewhere. “Go help Moses fix his fence.” Or, “Dianne phoned, she needs someone to look at her car. It’s making a funny sound.”
Rosie sat on the heavy plank steps that led up to Ben’s door. “The light is good here,” she told herself as she sewed beads to leather and created an eight-sided star for the back of a pair of gloves. The truth was that the light at her house, a hundred steps further from the lake, was as intense. But if you challenged her on it, she would argue with you and no matter what proofs you offered, you would eventually lose the argument worn down by the strength of her conviction. She would never admit to you or to anyone that she was there because she was lonely and the feeling of Ben’s spirit moved around his cabin and comforted her.
A whimper from under the steps drew Rosie away from her beadwork to kneel in the grass, bend way over, and look under the heavy lumber frame. The yellow dog lay curled around six puppies tumbling with each other for a teat, all mouth and sucking, eyes closed. “You picked a good spot to have your babies.” The yellow dog raised her head at the words. “Seems everyone knows Ben will look after them.” The yellow dog licked the puppy closest to her tongue. “Thirsty work giving birth, isn’t it. Bet you’d like some water.” Rosie found a bowl she was sure Ben wouldn’t mind sharing. On the way out she grabbed the left-over fried fish. Sleigh dogs and fish, something about that combination just seemed natural somehow.
Rosie sat back on the steps — a fed, watered, contented mother lay in the shade somewhere beneath her — and wondered absently where Ben might have gone. To the city perhaps, more than likely the city she agreed with herself. He would not have gone north for any reason without taking his boat. She wet the thread by drawing it through her mouth to stiffen it so that it was easier to control and returned to firmly attaching the string of beads to their precise location on the leather.
Now if she were her grandmother, she would not sit here and wonder, she would fly away and find out exactly where Ben had gone and how he was making out. Rosie had never seen her grandmother, old Jeannie, do any of the things she was purported to have done. She had only scraps of conversations and whispers that told of the old woman telling her children, including Rosie’s mother, “I’m going to check on your uncles on the trapline. Don’t be scared. If it looks like I’m in trouble, just pass my shoes over me and I will come back.” And the old woman would go to sleep and dream and toss and turn and talk and if she became quiet, her children would pass her shoes over her and she would wake up and tell them how their uncles were doing. “Delbert killed a moose.” or “Walter fell through the ice, but his dogs helped get him out. He’s okay now.”
Ben had a secret, Rosie knew. He had a secret and it had a hold of him and wouldn’t let him be, it was like a limp or an ache, and it was always in the way and needed to be cared for like a sore thumb. But Ben had a big secret and it had started to bend him over with its weight. If he wanted to share it with Rosie, she would help him to carry it. She had carried the secret of the priest all her life and it hadn’t crippled her; it had made her strong.
But Ben’s secret was something newer, something he brought with him to the reserve, something from outside, from the white world. Probably had to do with money. Rosie looked around. The aluminum boat on the trailer parked in the shade of the large pines must have cost Ben a fair price, and the motor, well those don’t come cheap, not new ones anyway, and this house. Rosie turned around and looked at the log structure behind her. He must have spent money on it. Those were new windows set in wooden frames, and the door was solid, not one of those cheap doors like the contractors put on reserve houses. Yeah, Ben had spent a fair amount on his house. It might not look like it unless you looked close. Everything was plain, simple and the best quality. And if you added in the truck, well, Ben had spent a big pile of money since he moved back.
So Ben had money, big deal. He was a retired professor after all. So why did he go to lengths to act like he didn’t? Maybe he was embarrassed by it. Maybe he didn’t want to embarrass her with it. It didn’t matter. Funny thing about money — you put people and money together and strange things happen.
She slipped the long thin bead needle through a sequence of different coloured beads, raised the needle and shook the pretty
little bulbs of glass down the thread to where her solid left thumb waited to hold them firmly in place while she sewed them onto their designated spot.
If Rosie could travel like Old Jeanie, she would go find Ben and tell him — tell him what? That she was sitting on his steps while he was away because she wanted to be where he had walked, on boards he had nailed. She was sixty-four years old and acting like she was fourteen. What would Ben want with her? She wasn’t pretty. Not anymore. She wasn’t one of the educated, sophisticated. She was competently literate but wasn’t versed in literature. She preferred to read Stephen King and wasn’t in the least interested in the William Faulkner novel that lay open on Ben’s bedside table.
Something shifted in the shadow of the pines off toward Rosie’s left. She watched for it with her peripheral vision rather than turn her head and search boldly. The figure moved again. It was not skulking, just moving slowly between her house and Ben’s. She did not recognize the man at first, now that he was obvious and she could openly look at him. His hair was too short for the reserve where the fashion ranged from slightly longer to long. His was very close cropped. There was a familiarity about the face, as hard as it was. Somewhere beneath the mask of sternness lived someone she once knew. He came out of the shadows, walked up, and now stood in front of Rosie.
“Well, drop kick me Jesus. How you doin’, Rosie?” the humour in the words did not make it to the voice so the statement sounded bizarre.
“End over end, not to the left or the right, straight through the heart of those righteous uprights.” Rosie completed the football cult song. Her light laugh brought out the missing humour. “I’m not bad.” She put down her beadwork. “How’s Lester?”
“I’m standin’ here.”
“I can see that.”
“I mean, they never broke me, I’m still on my feet.”
“I can see that.”
“I made it. I made it home again.” Lester put one foot up on the first step, so that he stood at a slight angle to Rosie, so that he could deflect any possible attack.
Rosie sat squarely in front of Ben’s door, protective. “So what brought you back here?”
“It’s home, I guess. Nowhere else for me to go.”
“I was just wondering ’cause you don’t have any family here anymore.”
“Don’t have family anywhere I guess.” Lester looked around, then looked back up towards Rosie again. “I guess you’re about all the family I got Rose.” He closed his mouth firmly at the end of her name and stood there, with his mouth clamped shut so that his chin protruded. He looked strong, standing there with his hands tucked neatly away in his hip pockets, one foot on the step and his chin forward. Strong, and resolved, not begging. “Here I am; take it or leave it,” his body language spoke.
At that particular angle with the light filtered by pine, Rosie saw the resemblance between Lester and his mother. It was in the oval of the face and the proportions of cheekbone, chin, and brow.
“Have you eaten?” Rosie began gathering up her sewing. She would take him into her home. She was all the family that he had left and a cousin could never be turned away hungry, no matter what kind of a cousin he had been.
She was thinking about her Aunt Ester as she fried up the last few pieces of chicken. Ester had only been a few years older than Rosie, a young aunt, young enough that there were a few occasions that they had played together. Aunt Ester sitting with her little niece and putting dolls to bed. When they were a bit older but still young enough to be just playing, Rosie remembered Ester at parties, dances and laughter.
Then Lester was born and Rosie saw less and less of Ester. Then came Rosie’s children and she saw even less of her young aunt and her hard working husband and their house on the other side of the village. She had seen Lester occasionally as he grew up.
She glanced his way. He looked almost swallowed by the large over-soft couch as he tried to figure out the remote control for the television. Rosie liked that couch. It fit her. It clearly did not fit Lester.
Where did he fit? Anywhere? She wondered how he had fit in at the penitentiary. Maybe that was the place for people like Lester. Maybe, who knows? Maybe he changed. Maybe in all that time locked away he had gotten over being mean. Somehow Rosie doubted it, not the power of an institution to affect change, but that anything could ever be done to take the meanness out of Lester. He seemed to have been born that way. Rosie remembered comments that followed him around the community and now resurfaced in her mind a quarter-century later. The voice of an old man, an Elder spoke clearly in her memory again. “He didn’t get that way from either of his parents. He brought that with him when he came here.”
Rosie scraped the chicken from the splattering grease, careful not to leave anything stuck to the pan. The trick to brown chicken is in the turning. Rosie took pride in her ability to cook. It was something that she did well even, as was often, with very little to work with.
It made Rosie hungry to watch Lester eat. She left him at the kitchen table and took a cup of tea into the living room and visited with her friend the television. There wasn’t enough chicken for both of them. Oh well, it wouldn’t hurt her any to miss a meal now and then. She could call it dieting. She was happy that at this time of the day there were fewer food commercials, not like Saturday mornings when junk food lured children.
She suddenly wanted her children, any of her children, to be with her on the couch, to cuddle together against the danger. Yes, Rosie allowed herself to admit that she was afraid of Lester, had always been a little afraid of Lester. Even when he was a child, she had watched him closer than the children he played with, and never let any of her children play alone with him.
There were rumours that he tortured little animals, kittens and puppies and a squirrel that he knocked from a tree with a slingshot and kept alive until old Cecil found him and killed the squirrel out of pity. The stories had drifted through the community and followed Lester as he grew up.
“Norma went out with him; he said he was taking her to a movie in town. She won’t do that again.”
“You know how Wesley is, he wouldn’t fight back if he was being murdered. Why would someone pick on a guy like that?”
But, everyone is entitled to change right? Why couldn’t Lester have changed? He was human. Maybe he learned something in prison. It was possible. Rosie changed channels, pointed the remote and clicked. Crime scene investigation was not something she wanted to watch at this moment. People can change, unless they’re born that way.
He had put his dirty plate on the counter by the sink. Rosie quickly scraped off the bones and remains into a small plastic pail, something for the dog, hated to waste. Her hunger grabbed her again when she saw how much meat he had left on the bones. She was tempted to clean them off, nibble that morsel that hung loose, crunch the gristle from the end. Chicken bones should be clean. But she didn’t want him to see, didn’t want to embarrass him.
She finished her night routine; she had never gone to bed with a dirty dish in her house. The thought of it might wake her in the middle of the night and torture her. She did something however, that she had never done before and double-checked that the door to her bedroom was tightly shut before she put on her nightgown.
The sun shimmered on the black pavement, created illusions of cleanliness, of smoothness. Ben let the truck find its way around the curve, his hand easy on the wheel, relaxed. Summer exploded in colour where prairie met parkland, where farmland stopped pushing against the boreal. Aspen blended with large white spruce together in a canopy that protected the forest floor from direct sunlight. In the shade places, currants, and highbush cranberries grew in tangles. Where sunlight splotched the floor, broad spreading sarsaparilla protected the earth and buried its roots in the loam and lichens. Farmland ended in abrupt straight lines against walls of trees, a final fatal attempt at agriculture abandoned to scentless camomile and thistles. The fence lines that never did keep the deer from the fields sagged in droops of rusted
barbed wire where some of the staples still held the strands to leaning posts rotted at ground level.
South, Ben cringed. Why in hell was he going back. He had a good life. He had everything that he needed. No one bothered him, no one asked him for more than he was ready to give. Time had become his friend, rather than his master. Mornings like this should be for good brewed coffee and bird song. He contemplated turning around, but Monica had asked. A promise is a promise, is a promise. Ben’s word was more powerful than his wants. He clicked on the cruise control, set it to a hundred and nine, breathed in and let his shoulders relax as he breathed out.
Moccasin Lake pulled at his mind, or perhaps he was repulsed by the rush of glass and steel on asphalt. Rosie’s actions yesterday perplexed him. He had expected her to behave like an old gossip, rush to his cabin as soon as Monica’s car left to find out all that was to be found out. She had not even asked. Perhaps she was unaware? No, she had moved the silk scarf Monica carelessly left on the arm of the chair, picked it up, checked its authenticity by gently touching it against her cheek, nylon feels different up close, and laid it carefully aside before sitting.
Ben’s ability to predict had developed over the years to the point now where he was confident in his gift. Rosie disrupted that confidence. She had not behaved in the manner he expected. That was it, wasn’t it? She had not acted the way he, Ben, expected. His gift was secure. He had not used it. The gift was something outside of Ben. It was different from rationality, closer to intuition. His prediction of Rosie’s behaviour was premised upon his ego, upon his sense of importance and superiority. He had assumed that Rosie would behave badly out of jealousy. A good lesson in humility, the most necessary ingredient of the gift.
The Cast Stone Page 3