They’re not so much cities up there as depots that have sprawled. That entire place could be folded into a briefcase and carried away. It’s funny to write down but we really did think we were going to make a fortune from farming. We rode out to the end of the tracks and then by truck the rest of the way to Grande Prairie, where they gave us our title, and we had our goods and chattels—saws and files, and spikes and baskets, and two stoves and two tents, and knives and hammers and chisels—and off we went. And we bought a couple of dray horses and a man came, ragged as a pony man, and asked, “How many axes you got?” And I said, “We got all our supplies,” and he said, “You oughta have four axes, in case one breaks and another’s lost. You’re nothing without an axe.” And so I did buy a couple more axes, and the fellow was right. A man out there is his axe and no more.
As we drove up to our little number on the map we were smiling. We sat out on our desolate strip of land, a huge piece of hugeness between four iron posts, and we were pleased as a dog on a meat truck. Look how much we own, we thought. Look at it all. But what is it that you own? That’s what you have to ask yourself. Always. What do you own? We owned dragging ourselves off the ground because we didn’t own a bed. We owned the soil. We owned the weather. We owned the risk.
It snows every month but August in that country. To raise a crop of wheat you have to be lucky, but we were in our twenties, we knew we were lucky. Max said, “You’re the ideas man,” and I said, “You’re the brawn man,” and we set about a sod cabin, our one-room subterranean home. You start with a basement and build up. The joke was “Nobody needs to dig a grave in Grande Prairie, everyone’s living in one already.” And that was half a joke because a couple of our neighbors did hang themselves in the winter and weren’t found till spring.
I did the cooking on the cast-iron stove that nearly broke my back from stooping. Max couldn’t parboil shit for a tramp. He chopped the kindling. On the plus side, there was a magnificent whorehouse in town. Just a small family place. The thing I remember most about Madame Helene’s was the chess. Helene had brought all these fancy girls out of Montreal, and the rooms were only half full, but whenever you came into the foyer, Madame Helene was always playing chess with the customers and she always won. Always. I realized after a while that most of the men were visiting Madam Helene for the chess games. I would wager on it. Chess was the cure for the loneliness. The other stuff was more like sneezing. She sold the boys a confab over a game of chess with maybe a screw thrown in for good measure. No one is more polite than a prairie madam. Wouldn’t say shit if her mouth was full of it. She figured me out, too, and whenever she came in from Edmonton brought all the papers for me, which she marked up about four hundred percent. Those were our happiest days along the Peace River, the days we drove back from Madame Helene’s. The horses knew where they were headed and I could let ’em drift back, Max sleeping and me catching up on week-old news.
Even that pleasant journey nearly broke us. I remember once, drifting back home from our Sunday, we got caught in the worst hailstorm I’ve ever heard of. Biblical. We had to tuck the horses’ heads with us under the wagon for a bit. Sure enough, when we stood up out of it, the first farm we crossed was fifty dead cows—beaten to death by the sky. And we passed another Englishman’s farm where three little girls in floral-print dresses were frolicking through the fields and gathering up hail into glasses for iced cordial. They didn’t own cows, I guess.
From sunup to sundown, we hacked away at our land. We scraped away the sod, slabbed the stuff. There was a part of the section treed but we took a whack and left it. The worst was the bouldering, and that was for Max. There is work that isn’t fit for a white man, and that’s it. I did the cooking, like I said.
Then the first full moon came. I woke up three days later on the side of the field, smeared in blood, with Max by my side. How? I don’t know. I knew nothing. Blackout. You know, son, Max and I were always asking ourselves when we come back, what was the exact moment we knew we were never going to amount to farmers. I always maintained it was the very first day, the day cutting sod to build a house. Max believed it was the first moon.
At the time, you understand, we never discussed how we were only hacking at the earth because we needed something to do for a year so we wouldn’t be too ashamed when we returned to Aunt Millie. We never discussed anything, as far as I remember. So maybe Max never recognized that we failed. He threw himself at the country. I knew soon enough, anyone could know, that the boy was throwing himself against nothing. The more he threw himself at the nothing, the smaller his efforts seemed.
We heard the wolves howling one night in June. I’ll remember Max’s face the rest of my life, that moment. The look of recognition.
Three days later we saw them, a pack roiling through a far stand of aspens, with their eyes low. We did not interest them yet. We weren’t easy meat or imminent threat. So they slunk back behind the aspens.
“What do you think they want?” I asked Max, who was standing mid-roll with a boulder the size of a dead body that he was clearing off the territory.
“What do you think they want?” he asked back.
“I think they want us off their land.”
We stayed because according to a fiction in a government office in Grande Prairie, those fields belonged to us.
The wolves didn’t reappear until the winter. The winter came soon, though. That first blizzard surprised everybody, surprised the wolves, too. Covered the whole sod cabin. Took us two hours working the door to open it after. First a crack. Up and down, up and down, like a whore’s shorts on payday. Eventually, we worked enough to stick a cup in the space and scrape it out and heat the water and throw it out. When we finally worked the door open we wondered why we’d bothered. Where were we going to go?
You know an odd fact about the prairies? In the Second World War, the Canadian navy discovered that the best submariners came from Saskatchewan. Know why? Because there’s little difference between the prairies in winter and the bottom of the sea. We had splurged on a small pane of glass in our sod cabin, and we had built to all government plans, but the smoke from our fires was sooty and blurred the window and ourselves. We had firewood but had to use buffalo chips when it ran out. Burning frozen shit is about as fun as it sounds and the fire didn’t matter anyway. The cold was permanent. In the morning the floor was a mess of snow and the wool blankets were frozen stiff. We were only doing a mite better than if we’d been laying up on the naked ground, but it was exactly the difference between living and dying. You have no idea how much a man craves a newspaper when he’s so alone.
We had no newspapers so we played cribbage. What else? No hunting. Max tried, but anything that could survive that cold could survive Max. It is the stillness up there that stuns you. The way the snow stays in clouds along the branches of the evergreens with not so much as a raven daring to kick its defiant lightness. The snow amounts to a sneer. Everything is much too simple. Then the wolves came again. We reckoned they had come up against a herd of bison. One day we heard the howl, in the middle of the day. We could tell it was the middle of the day because the window was greasy yellow rather than greasy gray. Max ran out into the sound, without a coat, returned a freezing hour later next to death.
He said there were seven of them. I said it didn’t really matter if there were seven or seven hundred, he wasn’t going out there again. I needed him for cards. He said we ought to invite them in.
My boy, we were awfully far from Flora Avenue. Fucked and far from home, as Max liked to say. I tell you I would happily have cuddled Aunt Millie.
Then one night the moon lifted and Max vanished. Lord, I was furious. I even snapped on my snowshoes and followed him, followed the tracks of the wolves, but hunting wolves is like trying to catch fish in the ocean with your bare hands. If you’re hunting wolf, you need a cheap trick, like a tied-up goat or something, and I was all out of cheap tricks. I managed to snag a moose kid, though, which I took to be a triumph until I
carted the carcass home and tried to eat the thing. Alberta winter is so sparse the flesh of its animals is musky to the point of poison. It’s leather all the way down. Not that I didn’t eat every scrap of that moose. I ate that disgusting moose and played solitaire for about a month.
Then the moon came again, and Max returned with the brood, and I returned with him and with them.
We were wolves that winter. We ran with a pack of nine. The cold was our home. Hunger was our home. There were days when we ate and days when we did not eat. We wanted buffalo or moose. Ripping apart a rabbit or a fox was just practice, playing with killing and squabbling over the bloody snow. Then when the wind rose up, we hid together under the blankets of low pines where we could find them, or burrowed under the mossy stink of aspen leaves, our breaths heaving together. The first scent in the morning was a taste of life or death. It was pure. Our hunger began in the dark. We searched for a trace of weakness, any weakness, a whimper in the middle of silence.
We always ate until our guts sagged. Then we slept dimly under a pine tree, the nine of us, in the fullness of our bellies. And that was happiness.
We almost died several times that winter. We almost ate each other. Mostly we survived on the corpses of buffalo calves that had frozen, and we ran into a herd and that kept us through the worst of January and February. We ate disguised ptarmigan, we ate dangerous bobcat. We ate voles by the hundreds. We ate what we could eat. We ran together until the spring, when we cracked up like everything in that country cracks up in the spring, when the faint new warmth is the world trying on mercy for a lark.
The winter cored the Wylie brothers. Alberta hollowed them out. At the end of all their agonies, their stake was wilderness. They left their claim for Grande Prairie, where the sale of the tools paid for the train that carried them back to the station in Champlain where they had initially applied for the grant, which brought the business back to where it started, a neat round zero.
Stepping onto the platform, dragging their worn bodies back home, Dale and Max peered at once-familiar scenes, store owners fondling easy fruit on their counters, schoolgirls sharing lemon sherbets, oldtimers rattling uselessly to one another on the street, all as if through a green-glass aquarium. If you forget, even for a moment, why people do what they do, it can be hard to remember. On Flora Avenue, the boarders wouldn’t allow them into the house, no matter who they claimed to be, so for an afternoon, the boys sat on the blue trunk while their old friends and neighbors crossed them without a glimmer of recognition. Even Marie Wylie, bundling loads of laundry into the house, had to squint through the raggedy grime to identify her defeated sons.
She walked them to their old room and then, arm in arm, up to the cemetery, to the small plot with its small slab where their father, who had been a small man, lay dead and buried.
“Flu carried him away. He was one of the first. Sudden. That was more than a small mercy.”
She inspected the grave and its marker the way she might a bolt of gray flannel brought home from the fabric merchant. Had she overpaid? Had she received quality for money? Max and Dale squirmed in their frayed outfits. They weren’t dressed right. Max in khakis. Dale in gunmetal gray. Neither with a scrap of black.
“What happened to the barbershop?” Dale asked.
“Sold it.”
“What happened to the money?” Max asked.
“The mortgage.”
That was all the eulogy Bob Wylie ever received.
*
Kitty Donclaire was very much alive. Her dark eyes were still peering from the dinner table, always by Marie’s side. She no longer worked at the brick factory, though no one ever saw her working in the house. She would sit beside Marie at the laundry or over the pot scrubbing, and every now and then Marie might whisper into Kitty’s ear. Nobody asked the reasons, the nature of their arrangement, least of all Max and Dale. They slunk from her gaze with a primitive unease.
Mother’s law had not altered: If you stayed in the house, you helped on the mortgage. Dale needed his old job back. He had to stoop to enter the back room of MacCormack and Sons, that shrine where the Scottish prophet of fiduciary responsibility lorded over the huddled scrutineers of the ledgers, the holy books. John MacCormack was pleased. The return of Dale Wylie, prodigal businessman, justified his instinctive and acquired pessimism. As if it needed justification.
“Gentlemen, behold. Not the gods can turn back time.”
“Mr. MacCormack …” Dale began.
“Gentlemen, we are presented with an example,” MacCormack continued, ignoring him. “I will not say a warning. I will neither say a beacon. An example. The man who took a chance and failed. What are we to think? Are we to respect his courage or condemn his folly? By what calipers are we to measure a man? By the scope of his ambition or the size of his achievement?”
MacCormack gazed on Dale with a tender and bloody contempt.
“How would we judge the ancient Romans? By their achievement? They have achieved, ultimately, a pile of dusty old stones. Or are we instead to worship dreams of eternity, the visions of the Jews in their desert?”
He pulled open a chair behind a stall, and shooed its disgruntled inhabitant over a half-desk’s width. “I do not need to inform you gentlemen that time goes but one way. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to rate the value of municipal bonds. Time leaves us, at least, with something to evaluate. Something to look at. So what are we looking at now, gentlemen? Are we looking at a pile of dust or the elusive remnant of a dream?”
Dale sat back in his old chair. Nobody needed to explain.
*
After Alberta, Champlain wasn’t enough for Max Wylie’s body. He roared onto the autumn harvesting crews in Indiana, and beyond to the lumbering in Idaho and Washington, returning to spend the winter and the money in Champlain. Max would materialize without warning, gathering crowds as he strolled like a lord down Flora Avenue, everyone wanting to breathe in a bit of the winds that coursed around his strength, because he brought the smell of the whole country with him, the grandeur of the wild man. The boardinghouse women adored his stories of men who rode single logs down a hundred miles of river, and bets with Chinamen about who could climb a mountain faster, and murders in distant towns that hinged indirectly on Indian curses. No need to boast anymore. He could speak softly. The girls would lean in.
Over dinner to celebrate his return one July evening in 1921, one of the frail office girls asked, “Mr. Wylie, what is the West like?”
He launched into a romance of the plain’s grandeur, pausing on its homely churches, and the honey-storm music that seeped through the stained glass on a Sunday morning. When his mother had passed out of the room, he asked them quick, “You want the truth, girls?”
The boarders insisted they did, and Max rolled a thick slice of bread into a ball, popped it in his mouth, and whispered, “The West smells like pussy.”
*
Max meant that the West smelled like money, Dale knew. The West smelled like having a piece, not having to account for every nickel in your pocket to Mother, to MacCormack. Freedom and spending. Free-spending. Dale found out about the smell of the West soon enough. In the 1920s, MacCormack and Sons, expanding beyond Pennsylvania, promoted Dale to “director of the sales force,” a grand title for a hardship post in the timber and mining counties selling axe heads and rope, engine grease and bulk seeds, biscuits and blue jeans, selling whatever he could figure out that people wanted to buy.
In 1923, Dale arrived for the first time in Atkinson, a mining town on the Minnesota–Dakota border. The founding myth of the town of Atkinson is an appropriately bleak fairy tale. The town sits on the site of a chicken farm where the original owner, over a supper of cockerel’s gizzards, sunk his teeth into soft metal. The bit was solid gold. Immediately, he slaughtered all his chickens and rummaged through their guts for more.
Atkinson fit its foundational myth well, a bloody mess made in the quest for a little money. The minor gold rush of the twen
ties, thirties, and forties was all slapdash, shanties zanily sprouted along cracks of real and imagined subterranean wealth. Dale loved the action. Even the train buzzed with happening. Everyone was on the make or falling apart or both. As he stepped out for the first time, onto the muddy mush of the Atkinson roads, he breathed in the town’s hilarity. A man in a bowler and a taut three-piece tweed suit, arm in arm with a drunken, flattering easy lay in an emerald dress, smiled nefariously while passing. Welcome to town, buddy. See what you can pull. In Atkinson, glamorous stories were everywhere: Irish who arrived with shovels and scratched out millions. Stakers who strained nugget gold out of their canteens by accident. Telegram boys palming five-dollar tips from gamblers. Greeks who turned single coffee stands into chains of dinettes. Men were achieving respectability all the time in Atkinson.
Dale hunted from call to call, from corner store to corner store, from hotel to hotel, from camp to camp, smiling at the frowning, bored men who either hated to buy things or wouldn’t or couldn’t, and then offering and insisting and failing and leaving. Rejection is the river in which the salesman swims. The river is shrewd and fierce and runs cold. The faces reflected on it blur into a single rush—dubious eyes and arched brows and stupid mouths and the cynical crook of a cigarette out of a cheek. People seethe and you must seethe with them. Even the boys looked up at him funny, like he was the pig about to be slaughtered. The whores shut their doors on him tenderly, pityingly. The bartenders added a fingernail to his finger of Scotch. The man who eats what he kills deserves respect and succor. After days of pure hustle, he would save on his quarters by heading straight to the train station where he could lean against the plinth on the platform, asleep, until the next morning’s train. Why pay for a flophouse? The station had heat.
Hunger of the Wolf Page 5