Summer of the Horse

by Donna Kane

  Maybe, if I pick up my pace, I’ll get back to the tarn and no one will ever know. But there he is, Wayne, striding toward me, carrying a huge bag over his shoulder, that same wild look of relief on his face.

  “What’s in the bag?” I say, trying for nonchalance.

  “Survival gear.”

  We walk back to camp, strange animals following a trail made by other animals. We are quiet. Some fine cartilage is building, a connective tissue laying its foundation inside us. A history, a story to tell.

  When we get back to camp everyone makes much of me and my drenched body. It turns out there was a second lake, but it was hidden in a fold of the mountain and could only be seen from farther west. The lake I saw had to have been the lake we were camped at. I don’t know why I didn’t see the tents. Maybe my fierce refusal to be lost ensured I was.

  After I’ve changed my clothes and warmed up by the fire, I look up at the place where I was—not lost—bewildered. But that’s not right. I was lost. I might have known how to get back to where I came from, but I had no idea where I was. I would never be able to find the particular dips and hollows where I spooked myself. My fingers stiff with cold, I feel like an exchange has been made—inside me a part of the alpine still clings, unnameable in its strangeness. And in the alpine, a part of me remains, still trying to find my way home.

  Twelve

  A Memory of My Father

  The mosaic of red and grey tiles that walled the exterior of the Co-op glinted in the light of a late-day sun. The tiles looked waxed, as richly lustred as my patent leather shoes with a daisy on each toe, the petals a deep blue plastic. I was a skinny, freckle-faced girl with red hair now inside the store, in Giftware, standing beside my father on bits of broken glass as the farmers’ wives pushed their carts up and down the grocery aisles, buying their weekly supply of sliced bread, perhaps a ham hock or turkey, cans of peaches, tins of sardines, just as they had been doing for over fifty years—a place where the cashiers knew the elderly patrons’ membership numbers by heart.

  What my father had meant to do was pick up the glass canister and call it fancy, but what he did was hold it by its wooden lid so the canister unsuctioned and fell to the floor. It is likely that my mother, waiting in Clothing, distractedly sifting through the racks of blouses, thinking Canisters, for heaven’s sake, why is this so hard for him, jumped at the sudden noise but then grew deathly still.

  On a day when grain prices fluctuated and the humidity of the wheat kernels in the granary were in question, my father and I stood, thousands of shards of broken glass at our feet, my father’s tanned face gone ruddy, the pearl snaps of his wrangler shirt buttoned to his throat. The astonishment on his face reminded me of another spring day when the two of us had looked at my mother in the opened door of our farmhouse, the scattered stems of dandelions weeping their milk into the gravel, my mother standing in the doorway with her arms outspread, having flung the fine yellow-strapped blossoms to the ground. I was baffled, waiting for reason to fit like the bright coloured blocks shaped as stars, squares and circles that slotted into the holes of the plastic ball I often played with, the pleasant clunk-drop of things gone as planned.

  Store-bought flowers were what my mother had wanted. How could he give her weeds, she had said. In the wilted air of disappointment, I considered my father, how we’d walked from the pasture, lighthearted at sighting the first spring flower beside the fence post. The gesture gone wrong. And this time, too, my mother’s birthday canister, bits of glass scattering like a surprised flock of starlings lifting from the wheat-yellow stubble startling me and my father, as we’d been startled by the thrown dandelions, my mother picking them back up from the dirt, saying she was sorry, only she looked hurt.

  I tried not to look at my father, whose gaze had turned toward the bench just inside the entrance of the Co-op, where, seated tightly beside each other, their thighs touching while their wives did the shopping, the men might be discussing the Crow rate, the bushels per acre of barley, and always the weather forecast they’d heard on the radio or noted by the cloud patterns in the sky.

  I heard the clerk talking. She was saying there was blood on my father’s hand from the canister that had gone from shaped glass to a spray of shrapnel. I could see how my father’s shame had grazed and wounded him, his shyness allowing nothing but breath from his mouth. I wished I could have put my hand under the jar and caught it before it fell. That was the moment I knew how carefully my mother must have worked to hide the difference between what appeared—“Look at the canister my husband has bought me for my birthday”—and what was: a husband so shy he could hardly enter a store. I flamed with the knowledge that my mother had given me this task, to take my father to Giftware to buy the canister while she pretended to be elsewhere, a task intended to ease my father’s annual chore, my mother watching the clock on the wall, her hands touching the blouses on the rack in the clothing aisle, gestures meant to give space for us to buy the birthday gift, a task that had failed, my father holding the wooden lid and the glass jar smashed to bits.

  Bit by bit, the world loses its shine. I saw my father’s humiliation and felt a hurt I couldn’t name. I wanted rid of the shyness that came with broken canisters, a hovering clerk addressing the cut on my father’s hand; I wanted gone the shards of glass, the awkward silence that spread like frost, wanted back the shyness that came without shame and letdowns, a shyness inseparable from that gentle light in which my father would play the banjo on rainy afternoons and I’d curl up beside him, feel the vibration of the instrument against my small bones, the heat of his tanned arm, the gentleness when once, having moved a bale of hay with his tractor, my father had stopped the tractor and gotten off, then in the curve of his palm lifted a pink macaroni noodle—the baby weasel that had fallen from a nest in the crook of another bale—and laid it back in its nest with such luxurious care the memory of it makes me ache.

  Now my father was in the hands of strangers, in the hands of the clerk and the janitorial staff who were cleaning up the jar he had broken, swooping down to pick up a piece of glass that I’d kicked, scuffing the toe of my patent leather shoe; employees who only wanted to be helpful, to pick up the shards of glass that would never be pieced back together. But my father would not speak.

  Back in our living room, my father playing the banjo, my small body feeling again the tremors of the music, his gentle light returned. But it was an altered light—it was not the innocent shyness of before. It had the taint of inferiority. The memory of the broken glass had put a flaw in it. It was not the shyness from which beauty comes; it was the shyness that is the wizened seed of things unconfronted.

  On some future spring morning I will feel restless with my shards of memory, the serrated shapes that didn’t fit then worn down by hopes since realized or dashed, experiences lustred then dulled, the glint and unglint of each conglomerate day. I will feel a pinprick of sadness, but the moment will be quick to rub against others so its distinction wears away. It will not graze or wound as before, this childhood thing, this wish for perfection, but something—might it be wisdom?—will have settled in. Something I could never, at that long-ago moment, have accounted for, though surely it had begun even then.

  I ready myself for the challenge of Bucky.

  Thirteen

  First Day on Comet’s Trail

  In order to hose Comet before I go to work each morning I have to set my alarm for 6:00 a.m. The irony of keeping trail time when I’m at home is not lost on me: it’s one more tick on the list of all the travesties made against the summer I thought would be mine. But I know the indignity I feel is really borne of something else—I don’t want to be responsible for Comet’s demise. I am terrified I will fail.

  One good thing about my anxiety is that when the alarm goes off, the adrenalin rush of my fear makes it easier to get out of bed. I look out the window. Not a cloud in the sky, the morning light touching the blades of
grass, the leaves of the weeping birch, as if night were a filtration system, sifting away the impurities of each day and returning a distilled, pared light—photons shed of mass. I grind coffee beans and turn on a kettle of water before putting on my jacket and my gumboots. See you on the flip side, I say to my empty coffee cup.

  To get to the Quonset where Comet’s halter and vet supplies are, I walk past old lilac bushes and copses of willows. The yard was landscaped when we bought the place and it’s one of the things that made me want to buy it. The apple trees and flowerbeds all follow the natural curve and slope of the ground. The yard has an expansiveness to it. When I look back at the farmhouse, it makes me think of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. Except that I am not as far away from the house as Christina was in the painting, and we’ve painted our old farmhouse a pale yellow with orange trim. A few years ago, Wayne installed an underground watering system, and we’ve attached the hoses that lead to Comet’s corral to the faucet next to the vegetable garden, the one nearest the Quonset—Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey, I say to myself to make sure I’ve turned the tap in the right direction.

  The door of the metal shed squeaks on its hinges and bangs shut behind me. I wonder if Comet has heard this and if he is glad someone’s come or if it has put him on edge. I’ve set up the supplies on an old table. Before Wayne left, he and Brian constructed a small shelter at the other end of the building, the two metal doors pulled open so Comet could come in from the corrals. I fill the oral syringe with the liquid antibiotics, grab the bottle of Fura-Zone, the jar of Swat, and put a few horse treats in my pocket. I think of my neighbour Joyce, who trains horses and says, “I don’t do treats.” I will do whatever it takes to get Comet to like me. I can hear Wayne saying, “It’s not a question of like. You can love a horse but it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of difference to them. That’s not what they’re looking for; they’re looking for good solid direction, consistency.”

  I walk out to the pen with as much resolve and determination as I can muster—Comet, you are going to let me put the syringe in your mouth. You are going to let me halter you and hose you for twenty minutes. I think of something else Wayne says when trying to support the argument that horses don’t mind doing things for us: “They’re big. If they didn’t want to do what you asked them to, they’d kick your lights out.”

  I carry my cellphone in my pocket so I can time myself. Whatever happens, it won’t be because I haven’t done exactly what the vet has instructed. Twenty minutes twice a day.

  Comet is standing at the far end of the pen. He is looking at me. I might be imagining it, but he looks pathetic. Gone seems the quickness of his movements, the light in his eyes. His wound gapes as if an entity has taken over, assumed control. A friendly mare called Bailey and a young pinto gelding named Ronnie were held back from the other spares who were sent to the Hutterites, the idea being that they’d be company for Comet, even though they’d have to stay on the other side of the fence. Comet can’t be in direct contact with other horses, the reason as clear as the gash in his flesh—they might start pushing each other around. Comet is contained in a small pen to discourage even his own movement. The sight of his containment, of his big scarlet wound that looks like a good part of him is missing, makes me panic—what if he doesn’t survive?

  “Hey Comet,” I say and walk up slowly. It’s no problem getting the halter on him—I mean, let’s be serious, the horse is wounded, and besides, I’ve spent a few weeks on the trail every summer for the past seven years. If I can’t put a halter on by now, then I truly am a loser.

  My first year on the trail I rode Hazel. Poor Hazel, the indecencies she’s had to suffer at the hands of novices like me. I remember what a big deal it was to get the bit in and out of a horse’s mouth. I was terrified I’d hurt the horse. That first year, so anxious to get the bridle out of Hazel’s mouth at the end of the day, I slipped it off with the reins still tied to a tree. Hazel reared her head up in alarm and for sure the bit would have jarred her teeth. I couldn’t sleep all that night, the scene playing over and over in my head. The next year, I graduated to Spunky, who had more energy than Hazel and was more suited to my build, both of us finer-boned.

  “You look good on that horse,” Wayne would say.

  A few years after that, needing Spunky for other guests, I started to ride Bucky, a gelding used mostly as a pack horse because he was good at it, but also because he had a nervous streak that made him inconsistent. Bucky and I got along. We were of the same nature. I felt we understood each other.

  I lead Comet to the inside pen, where the water hose awaits. He follows easily. I tie him to the fence, stick the syringe into the side of his mouth, and for a moment forget that he is wounded. The power with which he jerks his whole body backward, tossing his head into the air, feels absolute. My heart races. A man’s horse. I think of phoning Emilie, but how lame is that. I can’t give up that fast. I loosen the rope and tie it to a lower rung of the corral so his head is down. I push the syringe into his mouth again and squeeze the plunger as he tries to rear his head but can’t, the fence board shuddering on its nails. Some of the antibiotic dribbles back out of Comet’s mouth. I think again of Joyce, who said that in the end, the most important thing would be the rinsing of his shoulder. I loosen the rope so Comet can move his head freely, and then I turn on the hose, feeling the water first to make sure the sun hasn’t made it too warm. I turn the nozzle toward Comet’s wound, the water touches the open flesh and Comet jumps to the side, flinches, and then holds still.

  As I spray his shoulder, the water unhooks ragged flesh, some of it crusty with pus, some of it stuck to the stitches and looking like crushed bumblebees. There is blood on Comet’s nose so I know he’s been biting at his wound.

  “The stitches likely won’t stay,” the vet had said, and that’s where the blood, a watery glaze, is running out from, where the stitches have closed the deepest part of the wound. I focus my spraying there.

  “It activates the healing process,” the vet had told me, “and it keeps the wound clean.”

  I keep pulling my cellphone out and checking the time. At twenty minutes exactly, I stop. It’s like a recipe. Twenty minutes is what it seems to take for the flesh and scabbed skin to soften and start to peel away, for the bits of straw to loosen and fall, the wound opening back to raw. “Like pizza with the cheese pulled off,” is how Brian put it.

  Almost immediately, flies begin to land on the open gash. That is what the Swat is for. It’s pink as Pepto-Bismol but with the consistency of hard butter, and I apply it all around the edges of the wound. It feels like I am finger-painting, and every now and then I gingerly press down on the very edge of the hide that opens into the wound just to feel how thick a horsehide is. It is at least a quarter of an inch, the curb of it surrounding the wound as though framing an abstract painting. I squirt the anti-infectant Fura-Zone—the colour of furniture varnish—directly on the wound. I hope Comet lives.

  I untie him, take off his halter and walk into the Quonset, but he doesn’t follow. I pour some oats into a basin and stand in the makeshift shelter but the horse refuses to come near, so I bring it out to him. Each day, morning and night, I will pull the basin closer and closer to the shelter. Each day, morning and night, we will learn the routine of his wound.

  Fourteen

  Directions

  Wayne and I both grew up in northeastern bc. Our childhood homes as well as our adult ones were never much more than an hour’s drive apart.

  When Wayne was twenty-one, a skidder rolled on top of him, and he spent a few months in the Dawson Creek hospital; it was around the same time that I was a candystriper at the same facility. In 1994, we both attended the Ben Heppner concert at Unchagah Hall. At least once, we both donated pieces to the local art auction. But if we met at any of those times, neither of us can remember.

  In 1984, when Wayne embarked on a three-month horse trip into bc’s north
ern Rockies with his girlfriend Carol-Anne, crossing rivers, travelling through meadows, up and over mountains, beginning to see more clearly the difference between the landscape he was travelling through and the clear-cuts he’d helped to create, I had been married for four years and was pregnant with my second child.

  When the Mount Le Moray area near Hasler Flats, the place where Wayne had grown up, was under threat of logging, Wayne, along with his partner and other concerned citizens, formed the Chetwynd Environmental Society. Together they began a campaign to protect the last unroaded watershed of any size in the Dawson Creek timber supply area.

  “Wayne, it can never be done,” some said. “They’ve already laid out where the roads and cut blocks will be. That valley is a goner.”

  That was circa 1990. My younger child would soon be starting school.

  With an eye on some spare time ahead, I decided to get serious with my lifelong interest in art. In the fall of 1991, I enrolled in the visual arts program at Northern Lights College.

  “Back to school?” my mom said. “How will that work?”

  The Chetwynd Environmental Society held public meetings, gave slide shows, attended trade shows, signed up hundreds of people as park supporters. My young family must have attended some of those trade shows, but at that time, the focus would have been on my children as they roamed the booths for giveaway stickers and balloons.

  It was through the campaign to create a provincial park that the land and resource management planning began, a process that, according to Wayne, took strong negotiation skills. “You had to have a goal in mind,” he says, “and you couldn’t take no for an answer.”