by Patrick Lane
But Mother always told the boys her life went bad the day she first saw Elmer Stark striding tall down the correction line to the farm where she and her mother, Nettie, had waited for a man in the years after her father died. It took a long time for him to come. Elmer Stark. Lillian was already seventeen.
There was that last daughter I spoke of, the one who was not Mother’s. That baby was our half-sister, born from a woman Father brought out of the night to deliver in Mother’s bed. Another daughter, this one born to Mother’s curses. Father burned that baby in the orchard, a girl like Rose and me. She died unknown to all.
I named her Starry Night.
What happened to the mother in the years to come I do not know.
2
it was stone country where a bone cage could last a thousand years under the moon, its ribs a perch for Vesper sparrows, its skull a home for Harvest mice. The hills rose parched from the still lakes, the mountains beyond them faded to a mauve so pale they seemed stones under ice. Sage brush and bitterroot weathered the September night. In the desiccated grass of a vacant lot, a rattle snake followed in the tracks of a Kangaroo mouse, a Fiery Searcher beetle clambered over the dried body of a dead Wood rat in the dust, and a magpie slept inside its wings on a branch of dying chokecherry, the berries hard as dog knots. Stars shone like sparks thrown from shattered quartz, Orion reeling in the southern sky and Mars sullen and red in the west.
In the heart of it was a valley leading nowhere out but north or south. North was going toward narrower cuts of rock, deeper winters, darker forests, and even more desolate towns that turned into villages, villages into clusters of trailers and isolated shacks in the trees, nothing beyond but bush that ran clear to the tundra. South was going toward the desert states where there was no place a man could get work unless he was Indian or wetback, someone willing to take cash wages half what anyone else might ask. The only way you could stay alive down in Washington or Idaho was to break your back in the onion fields and orchards, set chokers on a gypo logging show, or steal. East were mountains piled upon mountains, the Monashee giving over to the Selkirks and Purcells, and finally the Rockies and the Great Plains. To the west was a rolling plateau where nothing lived but moose, bear, and screaming, black-headed jays. At the edge of the plateau, the rolling forest rose up the Coast Range until it dwindled against the scree, and on the other side of the peaks and glaciers was the sea, something most people in the valley had only heard of, never seen, the Pacific with its waves rolling over the dead bodies of seals and salmon, eagles and gulls shrieking.
The town squatted in a bowl beneath desert hills, its scattered lights odd fires stared at from up on the Commonage where a rattlesnake could be seen lifting its wedge head from the heat-trail of a white-footed mouse and staring down at the three lakes, Swan in the north, Kalamalka to the south, and Okanagan in the west, the Bluebush hills and mountains hanging above them in a pall. Against the sky were rocky outcrops with their swales of rotted snow where nothing grew but lichens, pale explosions that held fast to the rough knuckles of granite as the long winds came steady out of the north. In the valley confluence where the lakes met were the dusty streets and avenues of the town shrouded by tired elms and maples. What the snake saw only it could know.
It was the hour after moonset, dawn close by. The darkness held hard on the Monashee Mountains. Eddy walked thin down a back alley halfway up the east hillside, his eyes blinkered, their blue faded to a mottled white, the colour of the junk in his veins. Ankle-deep yellow clay lifted and swam around his boots. Silica whirlwinds, they shivered behind his heels as they settled back into soft pools. He moved slowly between broken fences and sagging, fretful sheds. The open windows of houses gazed blind into backyards, sleepers heavy in narrow beds, sheets damp and crumpled at their feet. In the alley, wheat grass and cheat grass draped their seed heads over the shallow ruts. A single stem of spear grass brushed against Eddy’s pant leg and left two seeds caught in the wisps of cotton on his worn cuff. He waded on through dust, the seeds waiting for their moment to fall in what might be some giving dirt, some spot where life might find a place to hide in winter. The alley held the illusion of water, thin waves of powdered clay shot through with the dead leaves of grass and chicory.
A slender ghost, lean as a willow wand, Eddy flowed in the languid glow of the heroin he’d shot up a half-hour before. Sergeant Stanley’s German shepherd slept uneasy on its paws in the run next to the ashes of a burned-out shed. Eddy had set the shed on fire the week before. He’d watched the flames from his car on the hill above and imagined Stanley in the dark staring at the wild fire, raging.
Sergeant Stanley was nowhere around. Eddy knew he was likely taking his usual time with some frightened girl he’d picked up and squired out to the west side of the lake on some false, misleading threat or charge. Eddy had seen Stanley’s women. The cop took his due with all of them, each one owing him her body in unfair exchange for the cell she didn’t want to see, the father, friend, or husband she’d never tell. When he was a boy, he’d crouched behind a chokecherry bush up on the Commonage and seen Stanley with his pants open, a scared girl on her knees beside the police car, working for her life as she bruised her knees on rock shards in the clay.
The shed had been the first thing.
The dog would be the second.
The German shepherd, Prince, was Stanley’s joy. When the Sergeant came home from rutting with some wretched girl in a deserted shack or cul-de-sac up the Commonage Road or out in the Coldstream Valley, he always walked down to visit his dog before going into the house. Eddy had been watching and imagined Stanley’s wife hearing her husband’s car pull up with its red bud pulsing. She’d be waiting for him in their bed, quiet and still in a cotton nightgown tight around her ankles, eyes open in the dark. Stanley would go to the caged kennel-run first and kneel to the surge of his dog’s devotion, its tireless love. His wife knew each step he took, counted him down the side of the house and across the yard to the alley. She waited breathless until it was time to count him back, staring under her lids at the closed door.
Eddy knew Stanley wouldn’t expect anyone to come again. And if he did conjure someone who burned things, how could he imagine him coming back to kill his dog? Stanley was still trying to figure out the fire. He might have thought it had been set by children playing with matches, but why would a child take the chance to play with fire in a policeman’s shed? Eddy knew Stanley would come round to it sooner or later, but between knowing and doing were twists and turns the man hadn’t negotiated yet.
If Stanley thought of Eddy at all, it was as a feral boy, the kind he looked toward when something went wrong in town. Eight years earlier, Eddy and his friend Harry had broken into the Royal Canadian Legion bar late one night, stealing liquor and taking all the money in the cash box, which was kept under the till. They were fourteen years old. The next night, the two of them got drunk in the park on a bottle of the whiskey they’d stolen and they ended up on Main Street throwing handfuls of quarters, nickels, and dimes to a packed crowd of drunks outside the hotel. Sergeant Stanley arrested Eddy, Harry having slipped away into the crowd. Richard Smythe, the town’s judge, sent him down to Boyco, the boys’ correctional school in Vancouver, despite Eddy being a year too young. Stanley wanted to teach Eddy a lesson. So did Father. Eddy never forgot Sergeant Stanley arresting him or the year that followed in that prison. There was something dead in Eddy’s head when he came back from the coast. The boy he’d been was no longer there, and in his place was someone gone past feeling, who thought nothing of pain, his own or anyone else’s. Even Father stepped sideways when Eddy walked behind him.
He’s a throwback, Father had said to Mother a month after Eddy returned home. My own father’s come out in him, he said.
You shut up, said Mother, her hands ripe with peach skins, jars boiling on the wood stove. You could’ve saved him from Boyco. You could’ve talked to the judge and got him probation, but no, not you. He went to that place beca
use of what you told them to do and no matter how many times you deny it, I know the truth. It was you did to Eddy.
You don’t know nothing, Father said.
Don’t fight, Tom would cry into their anger. What about Eddy? he’d say. What about him?
You shut up too, Mother would say, rounding on him from the sink, her paring knife a blur in a peach’s flesh. Why wasn’t it you sent away?
You’re crazy, said Father. You’ve always been so ever since the girls.
Shutup, shutup!
Eddy remembered Tom’s pleading for him, the slammed doors, Father’s truck heading up the driveway ruts, Mother cutting peaches into halves, the blunt of her thumb as she firked another peach pit out into the sink.
Eddy knew what had happened to him. That they didn’t care or didn’t know didn’t seem to matter any more. What mattered now was that Stanley hadn’t connected the fire to him. Shoulders hunched, thumbs hooked to his worn pockets, Eddy shambled down the alley. In front of him a shrew struggled across the clay, its naked paws swimming in the dust. He shifted his foot. The shrew was under his boot, something alive, something dead. What was in his head was the ball of ground meat laced with rat poison. As he walked on, his right hand slipped into his pocket and he moulded the wet pork ball in his fingers.
Eddy had been coming quietly at night for a week, talking to the dog, scratching behind its black ears, its tongue lapping at his fingers. The dog trusted him and wouldn’t bark. The night he set the shed on fire he’d offered the shepherd a bit of fresh ground pork as the flames began to lick the cedar walls. The dog had only sniffed at the meat and growled, but after a few more visits it waited at the pig-wire fence for him to come, swallowing the gift each time.
So what if he’d been throwing money and laughing at the drunks scrambling in the gutter for coins? But it wasn’t just being sent to the coast, it was the three days before he was put on the train, his two nights in the cells. Stanley was worse than the guards and older boys in Boyco. Twenty-two years old now and he had never stopped living what happened.
The iron clothesline pole at the corner of the dog run shot up into the night, a twist of rusted wire choked in its weathered ring. He stopped past the ashes of the shed, singed grass from the shed fire dibbling his boots. He grinned at the dog’s black nose shoved through the pig-wire.
The shepherd whimpered. Eddy thought he could smell the remnant heat of the sun withering out from the pole, dust-cake thick in his nose. He pulled his fist from his pocket and held the meat out.
He whispered through dry lips: Hey, pretty dog. How’s it going?
The German shepherd wagged its tail and whined.
3
the party was deep into its third night when Billy Holdman and Norman Christensen started to fight. The people had flowed out of the kitchen after them and formed a circle in the gravel turnaround at the back of the house. Under their feet were the dried fronds of summer’s dead poppies, frayed remnants of flowers grown from seed Mother had scattered there when Tom and Eddy were boys, along with the wreckage of years, rock crush and weeds, scraps of bark and hay, old blood from slaughtered animals, cigarette butts, lost nuts and bolts, oil, plantain, sawdust, chicken feathers, broken glass and scrabbled dirt, all that grew or was dropped or discarded, things of little use. The men and women surrounding Billy and Norman were like children on a playground who’d found something suffering and wanted to watch its struggle, a squirrel part-crushed by a passing car, a hawk with a broken wing, a crippled child going violently nowhere in a wagon without wheels, the handle stubbed into the dirt.
Tom knew there was no question of who was going to win. He’d seen Billy fight before. His thick body and heavy arms were enough to warn most away, but not Norman. He didn’t have a hope as he danced around drunk, half Billy’s size and some years younger, his useless fists flailing. Norman wasn’t a fighter. He spent his days and nights living in books, his belief that there was a truth to be found there. Norman had said once to Tom that what he imagined mattered to him. It was like the world map he’d torn from a National Geographic magazine and nailed to the wall in his basement room, a black X marking the place where the town should have been, no name there but for his enigmatic sign.
Girls had followed their men outside. They hung off strong arms and shoulders in their poodle cuts and pageboys, white blouses under pastel sweaters, circle skirts flounced out by crinolines, or narrow skirts tight to the hips, high heels, some worn, some new, the gravel crackling under them. The men stood beside their girls unaware, their bodies leaning forward, intent on the fight.
Billy, finally tired of Norman’s useless blows, picked up a hoe he’d seen in the trampled grass at the edge of the gravel and swung it, catching Norman high by the ear where his sideburn was and peeling back his cheek. The flap hung off the line of his jaw like a rubber rag. Norman’s teeth bright there in the yard light, quick stars in his red mouth. His tongue poked out for what seemed a long time, though it was only a moment, probing to see what the edges were to his face, and finding none, it retreated behind the molars, one silver tooth shining far back in the cave of his head. Then the fists Norman had were hands again, fingers trying to put his face back together, the air whistling as he breathed wet from his new mouth.
It was strange how the blood took a moment before it bloomed. When it did it was like sudden roses. Billy had the hoe up behind him and was going to swing again for Norman’s head when Tom grabbed it just below the blade, gripping the neck tight. Billy balked at the impediment, his hands clenched around what he thought was his to do with what he wanted. Tom held on where the steel blade was bound to the shaft and looked into Billy’s eyes. There were limits somewhere. They rested out there beyond the edges of the land. Tom had searched for them since he’d been a child. He’d walked into the high hills and deep into the gullies and arroyos, but he’d never found them.
Suddenly, Billy let go of the handle and turned in a tight circle. Tom, alone with the hoe, stumbled over someone’s boot. Two men, laughing, shoved Tom back into the ring. Tom steadied himself and flung the hoe, sending it deep into the sprawl of the tattered vegetable garden beyond the cars and pickup trucks parked slant in the first rows of ragged pea vines and dried-out corn. The hoe carved the air in awkward flight till it landed shaft down, vertical somehow like a starved skeleton among the hanging pods of runner beans.
Billy, you fuck, said Tom.
Nothing and no one ever tried to stop Billy. He came from a stump farm to the east of town in the foothills of the Monashee. Thin dirt and boulders had been his inheritance, the land as much him as anything he knew. He was the oldest child of a father who’d died under a load of logs sprung from the rusted-out cables of a truck on a hairpin turn south of Spuzzi Lake. Billy was given the weight of his father’s brood when he was fourteen. His mother had pulled him from school, the oldest of the kids, and sent him to work setting chokers behind a tractor on a logging show. Billy had grown up hard, the years he’d laboured to feed and clothe his tribe only making him tougher. He had many ways, few of them clean, none of them legitimate.
Billy raged away through the crowd and back to the house. Fucking Starks, he said to his fists as if the clenched hands had a hearing all their own. Norman, that little shit. Who the fuck does he think he is!
Norman staggered a couple of steps and sank down slow onto the shards of rock, the circle of drunks leaning in, their breathing stopped. Norman lay there on his side, curled up like a cat in sleep. His ripped face rested on one hand, the other hand caught in his crotch. There was no moan in him, not yet, the blow of the blade still a shock in his stunned flesh.
The flare of flames from the burning barrel beside the shed spilled comet tails into the sky. Wayne Reid had been feeding it with the last posts and boards from the east yard fence someone had torn down and kicked to pieces. The fire blazed as he ululated, his voice tremolo, his fat cheeks juddering. He stood beyond the crowd, spread-legged under the willow tree, his face whit
e as lard. Wayne turned twice around and let go both cylinders into the night sky from the shotgun that had been up till then hanging from its nails above the kitchen door. The party, the fight, and too much liquor had got him going. He came from town money, his father running the Chevy dealership off Main Street. He’d spent his young life looking for an outlaw hero and found both Billy and Eddy, Billy not caring about him one way or another, and Eddy hating him for the money he came from, for his weakness, his spoiled life. Tom glanced quickly over the crowd and saw Wayne waving the shotgun, a fat boy who liked to be close to destruction, knowing nothing of its cost.
Norman began to grunt through the blood and tears blotted on his skin. Tom got down beside him on one knee. Take it easy. It’ll be all right, he said, the people around him leering at Norman, who was holding the flap of his cheek in his hand as if he could somehow stick it back onto the cartilage and bone it had been chopped from.
Please, said Norman. It’s my face.
Vera Spikula came out of the crowd, pushed Tom aside, and knelt by Norman, her hand stroking his forehead, her brown ponytail swaying to her soothing cries. Tom remembered other victims he’d seen Vera with. She seemed to move from man to boy to man, each time ending up the worse for her caring. She had run away from a dead-end bush farm five years ago in yellow shoes she’d stolen from her mother. She was a girl with a heart full of misguided love. She mothered every man she met and forgave each one their sometimes casual use of her. There on her knees, she was like someone in a picture praying. Then, like a strange bird blown in from some other planet, a child-sized girl was standing in front of Tom. She stared at him, one eye partly closed, her face shadowed by the barrel fire behind her. Looking at her, he thought of the ring-necked pheasants his father had loved, birds that had been brought to the valley years ago from China and were still not quite believed by anyone, so alien were they to those who saw and hunted them. The strange girl stepped by him, her shoulder brushing against his ribs.