by Patrick Lane
Tom had seen women look at blood before, but this girl was different. She seemed drawn to what she saw, as if to her Norman’s ripped face was a way of climbing through his flesh inside him. She wasn’t afraid and because she wasn’t he knew she was rare. Small as she was and given her awe, he knew she’d need protecting. As for the other girls in the crowd, they stood in the glow of the drum fire, their voices whispering the ways of men, already making up a story about the fight to tell and so to be repeated for days in town. The girl with Vera wasn’t excited the way the rest of them were. She looked like she was thinking deep about what runs through a man’s heart.
After a few moments, the crowd began to break up, the excitement over, most of them heading back into the house for a drink. A few couples drifted toward their cars or trucks to do whatever it was they needed quiet for. When Tom stood up, he saw Joe Urbanowski with Billy’s dealer friend from the coast, Lester Coombs, Joe propped against the back wall of the house by the water barrel in polished cowboy boots, narrow jeans tucked into them. Lester leaned there beside Joe, laughing, his bald head gleaming under the moon. Joe, insolent, stared hard at Tom. He was Billy’s creature, and Tom knew he’d do whatever was necessary to keep Billy happy. Had it looked like Billy might have been in trouble during the fight, Joe would have tried to step in.
You guys seen enough yet? Tom called out.
Joe lifted away from the wall and swivelled on his boots, his heels harsh in the gravel. He walked slowly into the house, Lester following. They didn’t look back, the screen door slamming behind them.
Vera was still on her knees beside Norman, the other girl standing above them with her arms crossed under her breasts. She didn’t look more than five feet tall in her scuffed blue shoes. Vera pulled up Norman’s shirt and held it across his cheek as she got him to his knees. Help me, Marilyn, she said. I can’t do this on my own.
The girl ignored Vera, turning instead to Tom and smiling. Tom stared at her, thinking it odd how he’d been looking up at the Milky Way and now was seeing the same soft stars in her left eye socket drifting. He stepped around her and heaved Norman to his feet, taking one arm over his shoulder and leaving the other to dangle upon Vera’s chest. Marilyn stood a moment in front of the three of them, reached out with her finger, and touched it to the blood on Norman’s face, as if curious at what had come out of him.
Vera made a noise like something squeezed.
Marilyn looked up from her wet finger at Tom and said: This’s some party.
Yeah, Tom replied as he began to slow-walk Norman toward his rusted Ford. Tom asked Vera if she could drive Norman home. Yes, she said, Norman stuttering that he wanted to go to the hospital but didn’t want any stitches, his voice plaintive as a child’s.
It’s okay, Vera said to Norman. I’ll look after you. Marilyn trailed behind them as she plucked at bits of grass and leaf on the hem of her skirt.
When they got to Norman’s truck, Tom opened the door and helped him up onto the seat, Vera scrambling around to the driver’s side. His keys are likely in his pocket, Tom said. She slid across the seat and fumbled them from his pants, Norman holding his face together, groaning. Hey, Tom, his words coming in soft blurts. Whut’d he do that for?
Your guess is as good as mine, said Tom. You know what Billy’s like.
Marilyn had climbed up on the running board and was looking in at Norman. Get down, Tom said as Vera started the truck, a cloud of exhaust rising from under the tailgate. He put his hands on Marilyn’s waist and lifted her off.
Then the shotgun again.
God damn you, Wayne!
Wayne stood under the willow, shouting Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! He raised the shotgun and let go yet another couple of rounds into the branches above him, broken leaves falling around his shoes as Tom came up.
What the hell, Wayne! Tom said, wondering for a moment where he’d got the shells from and then remembering the box he kept on top of the fridge. He took the shotgun from him, blue smoke wisping from the barrels. Wayne staggered back and fell over a black-haired girl Tom hadn’t seen in the shadows. She was on her hands and knees under the verge of the tree near where it met the broken fence, her belly heaving.
The twelve-gauge shot Wayne had let loose rained down on the squash leaves in the garden, leaden seeds falling from the sky. Some of the last went pling plink pling on the scarecrow hat of the hoe. Tom figured he was the only one to hear the pellets fall, the others there too crazed to know the wonder of the sound.
He glanced into the darkness at the side of the shed. A woman he’d seen a few times at the bar downtown was bent over the hood of a pickup, her skirt up around her waist, her panties around an ankle, the man behind her flashing the white moons of his ass. Tom heard the woman saying, Hurry, honey, hurry, someone’ll see, the man going faster, buttocks and belly, the white flesh going slap slap slap. Tom looked away, and for a brief moment caught the silhouettes of his brother and Harry as they stared down from Eddy’s high window. They were there and then they were gone, the window an empty vault of light. Eddy had been up there in his room ever since Billy and Lester Coombs had arrived, Eddy making his drug buy from Billy as soon as the two of them had come into the house.
The bullet nose of his pale green Studebaker was parked under the fir tree, the car pointed straight at Ranch Road, no one daring to touch it or, worse, block it off. Eddy always wanted a clear route out. The car had been Father’s pride. It was only a year old when he won it off Harvey Jellison in a crooked poker game three months after Eddy was sent to the coast with Father’s blessing. Eddy got the car after Father was buried and fair enough. Tom got the shotgun. He still had the leather vest his father used to wear when he went into the hills, side pocket loops that held shotgun shells, the back of it a quilted black satin stitched across the shoulders with the name his father said he earned riding saddle bronc on the rodeo circuit back in the Twenties. Written in curlicues with crimson thread, Elmer’s moniker: The Chocteau Kid. Tom always carried the clasp knife he’d found in Father’s pocket the night he buried him.
The strange girl looked over at Tom, her curled brown hair shining with bits of light thrown off by the dying barrel fire beside her.
Like fire, he said, thinking of touching her waist with his hands.
What did you say? asked Wayne.
Nothing, said Tom, the shotgun in the crook of his arm. He broke the gun open, the spent shells falling into the uncut grass to get lost until the following spring.
4
father grieved his life, he grieved the sister he left behind on the farm in Saskatchewan, and he grieved his daughters. Because he didn’t have us long, he missed us more. He carried in his heavy hands the wrongs he’d done in this life. He sat and tried to wring himself away, but there was no ridding himself of what he wore under his skin. He raged at his sons for no other reason than that they’d been born boys. He’d perch on his heels beside Little Rose’s stone and sing his songs. “Roll Along Moonlight” and “The Drunkard’s Son” warbled from his lips, desert tunes from the forgotten times. He’d sing “Blue Okanagan” as he drank from a bottle of Crown Royal, little Buddy Reynolds lilting on his tongue.
When Tom hid down by the well, he’d watch his father’s lips move, Father singing of boots and saddles, dogs and cattle, the lonesome blue of sage, or telling of the days he roamed the prairie, and of darker times, earlier, when he was a boy. Tom’s eyes marked every move Father made, blunt fingers lifted to a cheek, a boot shifted in the dirt, a shoulder hunched. He thought if he learned each gesture, grunt, and shrug, he’d learn the man.
Sometimes Tom would go to see the graves in the old orchard, the few trees left there gaunt with thin suckers appearing among their branches every spring, branches that would blossom but rarely produce fruit. He’d go out and stand on that glacial drift, clumps of grass, rocks, and pebbles, hardened clay, the dust of years under his feet. Father had buried his fair share of animals there. What was it about those men that they liked to pu
t things in the ground? Father, his father, the father before him. They went back forever, those men. It must have been the wars, though Father said no one in his family ever fought in one. Why would they fight for something not their own? Maybe it was too much peace drove them to blood and burying.
Father almost never told stories to the boys in the early years. He’d drive Tom away when he bothered him. Father was mostly not there, off somewhere on what Mother called a toot, or he’d be covered in grease under his truck fixing something. He had little time for tales then, it seemed, except on those nights he’d sit with us in the orchard.
There was the one night I saw Tom come up on Father when he was sitting on the step at the back porch. Who knows why Tom’s begging that day got a story out of him? Anyway, he told Tom about the one time he and his sister, Alice, had been taken down to Minot, North Dakota, to visit family. When he was there, he met his grandfather. The man told him that when his own father was young he’d run off to Illinois from Kentucky, having got himself disowned fighting over a slave girl he didn’t know he’d been sharing with his father. He lost the argument they had, his father finally shooting him, the bullet in his side left there to nag him for the rest of his life. Father’s great-grandfather left Kentucky and never returned. He married a girl from the Bulliner clan in southern Illinois. Tom sat quietly and listened as the tale unwound about a feud that started between the Bulliner and Henderson clans in Bloody Williamson County back in 1869 during a card game. Elmer’s great-grandfather had been there that day when one of his wife’s family was called a lying son of a bitch over a bad poker hand. He had stood with the Bulliners, the long feud that started that day with the Hendersons a fight he could call his own. He ended up killing three men and helping bury sixteen others, women and children among them. He was shot twice, finally leaving ten years later, heading west with his wife to the Dakotas. Father told Tom that family mattered back then, that the only war the Starks had time for was a vendetta. When he told the story, he grabbed Tom and shook him. Nothing’s changed, he said. You remember that.
When Tom was a child, no matter his father’s loudness or violence, it was always clear what he stood for. His mother frightened him too, with her changes and her unquenchable needs. It was different with Eddy. He always said he knew who she was, no matter what she did. But Tom thought Mother touched Eddy too many times when he was small. Her kissing him all over sometimes went too far, that mouth of hers searching out the bits of him, her red lips leaving signs on his fair skin, Eddy looking up at her from his clear blue eyes.
Eddy was in Mother’s clutch when he was younger, but things changed. After his year away, he’d still go to her, but Tom didn’t know if it was simply to satisfy her demands or to play with her need for him. Sometimes Eddy would make her wait for him as he listened to her pleading for attention. Tom would sit alone in the kitchen, Father already gone to work and his mother and brother in her bedroom, and he would worry his life. He came to feel his birth was a mistake, the need he had for them all, leaving him bewildered. He always felt he was searching, but for what he didn’t know.
Tom tried to talk to Eddy about their father’s hate or love, but Eddy didn’t seem to care. He told Tom once that hate and love were just words in movies. Tom had read those words in books and even though he could find nothing in his own life that resembled the stories he read, he still believed in them. Father used to say that the country they lived in was too big for any tale to hold it. He said a story gets lost each time you try to fit it into the land.
Remorse was what rode Father down in those years. He never reconciled himself to his life. It’s strange how men try to appease the misery they feel, but regret is wasted on them. Father said he was only true to his daughters, but in the end there was no one to believe him, least of all us. We loved him, no matter the past and his many lies. He never had us long enough to hurt. But where was he when I wizened in my crib? What bar, back alley, cul-de-sac, or turnaround?
Eddy rarely came out to the graves. Tom would ask him to come and listen with him, but Eddy never wanted to. He could see everything he needed from his window at the back of the house. Many a night he saw Father bemoaning out there as he prayed to Rose and me, but Eddy never wondered how far back it went, father to son forever. Eddy had no need of squatting in the night, no need to beg a story. The grieving for a sister or a daughter was Father’s lament, not his.
When Eddy came back from Vancouver, he drew a hood over his skull. There were no words anyone could say that could lift it. It was the caul Eddy saw through. Before he went down to the coast, Mother was greedy for his love. When he was little, he’d earned his place at her breast. It was as if when he was born he took in devotion with her milk. God knows, it poured for him. She breast-fed him till he was four. He’d walk in from the yard and pull aside her apron, drink from a breast as if from a skin sack while Tom sat in his high chair staring at what wasn’t his.
Mother stroked Eddy even as she held on to her dream of a dancehall in San Francisco, taking off her dress in some fancy hotel room in Spokane for any man but Father. She kept her losses intact, this wrong or that, the emptiness of everyone but herself. She denied Tom to give to Eddy, who took as his due what he wanted from her, giving back his absence. Tom’s childhood wishes were field stones gathered from desert ground. Eddy saw them in his brother’s wretched stare and did for him what he could, giving him the care Tom got from no one else.
When Mother wasn’t around, Eddy would drag Tom in the wagon he’d built out of an apple box, the baby buggy wheels ones he’d found in a ditch down some road. He cotter-pinned them to the axles with bent nails and whittled a handle from a broken rake. On wash days, Mother would tie Tom in a harness and rope him to the clothesline with a ring clip. Tom would run back and forth from pole to porch, the ring screaming down the clothesline wire as he called for Eddy, but Eddy wouldn’t come. He’d be in the garden with Mother, that wagon of his between the rows piled high with weeds, her patting Eddy’s head as he dragged it through the clay-thick mud, hauling the weeds to the refuse pile by the poplar trees. There was an innocence in Eddy when he was small, no matter the trouble and grief that surrounded them. Like Tom, Eddy knew no other life. The misery others saw as they passed by the house was not what Eddy knew. He was a child and what child thinks his life less?
Mother’s need for Eddy was endless, and she was never far from his mind. It was as if he could smell her lament far off. When he caught the scent of her woe, he’d head home in his patched pants and dirty canvas runners. When he was bigger, he had the rusty bike he’d painted yellow from a can taken from some pillaged garage. He could be chasing some girl down an alley in town or struggling with one on a porch, breaking some basement window or using a stolen skeleton-key to unlock a house left empty too long. In the middle of things there would come a moment when he’d stop and turn away from a girl’s wet mouth, a wallet on a chest of drawers, or a purse hanging from a kitchen chair.
The day Eddy was sent away, Mother had stood on the platform at the train station along with the others. In the coach-car window a young Mountie fresh from Regina stood behind her boy, the policeman smiling down at her as she wept. Eddy stared straight ahead in the desperate hope that somehow someone would appear at the end of the railway car, some father other than his own who would tell him it was all a mistake, that Eddy would be all right, safe from Stanley, protected from what was to come. But his mother’s tears changed nothing. Eddy’s two nights in the cell below the Courthouse, his body breaking under the Sergeant’s hands as he was held down on the steel cot, all that and more had pushed him into a canyon there was no bottom to. From then on, all he ever did was brag that he’d die young.
Tom and Eddy never talked about what had happened when he was gone. What story Eddy might have had was just another part of the family’s silence, Eddy pretending he was the same as he was before and Tom knowing he wasn’t. There were stories enough about what happened to boys sent down to Boyc
o. Some never returned, choosing to drift on the streets of Vancouver or Seattle, and others who came back for a week or a month and then were never seen again. Some stayed on in town, sullen or boasting, some turned violent, and there were others so lonely their presence became unbearable, their families driving them away. They lived in the villages strung along the valley, boys no one dared go near for fear of the pain and anger in them.
What Eddy had hidden away drew Tom to his brother, Eddy’s emptiness sometimes so loud it made Tom afraid. Father had wanted Eddy broken and he was, though who Eddy had built out of the pieces he was left with was not the boy his father thought he’d get back. Mother never wanted to wake up Eddy’s silence, the words Eddy had buried too dangerous to be said aloud. Silence ruled the house, no one speaking of what they’d done.
When Mother was young, she’d imagined a wild life and it was not on a desolate farm in a forgotten valley. Years ago Father had given her the taste of who she could be when he bought her a Jitney dance for a dime, whirling her on the horsehair floor in the dancehall at Watrous. The bands came up from Minneapolis and Spokane, out from Winnipeg and Calgary, to play their magical tunes on Manitou Beach, the salt lake crusted around them. Before Father ever came she’d listened to dance music on the crystal radio in the farm kitchen. She’d heard Guy Watkins call the tunes on the radio from Danceland. The crystal radio whispered to her the syncopated beats from the far cities. She’d be perched on a chair with her ear to the fragile coils of copper wire listening to “My Heart Stood Still,” and “The Desert Song.” She practised the imagined steps of the slow fox trot, a pretend permanent wave in her hair. Her heels and toes went mad with a Charleston she invented from looking at pictures in a magazine of Joan Crawford in a movie, her father laughing aloud as she pranced around, her mother, Nettie, shaking her head.