by Patrick Lane
Harry took from Eddy’s hand the paper Billy had given him, opening it carefully. Use half, Eddy said, eager, and Harry took the spoon and matches from Eddy’s thin fingers.
Harry wiped it with his thumb and dipped for a bit of water from the back of the toilet, then shook a quarter of the brown heroin into it as he whispered to Tom: He always uses too much.
Tom watched as Harry held the spoon over a wooden match but the match burned down to Harry’s fingers, sputtered, and went out, Eddy humming urgently as he saw the flame go out in Harry’s fingers. Harry lit another, the heroin starting to bubble in the spoon, the powder seething in the boil. Eddy’s eyes seemed to reach out like fingers to the needle as Harry sucked the junk into the syringe through a tiny spill of toilet paper.
Eddy was slapping at what was left of the vein in the crook of his elbow with three flat fingers, then with his knuckles as he tried to bring a vein up, but his blood stayed buried, burned cold under the scabs. He moaned at his arm.
There’s one, said Harry, as a small vein appeared halfway between his wrist and elbow crease. Harry took the syringe and after a try or two, slipped the needle in.
C’mon, Eddy said, c’mon, and Harry drew the plunger back and pulled the barest of Eddy’s blood into the syringe. He waited a second, no more, and pushed the plunger gently down, the bubble of junk a tiny bloat under his freckled skin.
It’s okay, Tom, Eddy said, his eyes pleading.
The breath Eddy held went out of him. Harry put the syringe down on the back of the toilet and caught Eddy’s skull in his hand as it flopped to the side. He smiled as he stroked his friend’s cheek.
We’ll go out to my shack, he said to Tom. Until things cool off.
Tom reached down, picked up Eddy’s jacket off the floor, and handed it to Harry.
You guys do that, said Tom. Stay in touch is all.
10
the dead came crowding in, each with a story, what happened and when, who was there and why. Most faded into fragments, faint mutterings and murmurs, the stories rising as if from narrow caves, the sounds distorted, vowels drawn out into echoes, consonants clipped and rattling like a snake’s tail whirring in the sagebrush, the same kind of warning, the dead telling me things they thought I needed to know, tales from so far back they no longer had any meaning except to the ones who told them. I heard, I didn’t hear.
The house where I was born and died nudged up against Ranch Road. No whisper of smoke lifted from the chimney. The day had been hot, the doors and windows shut tight as Mother waited alone at the kitchen table, gazing at the mountain. A thin breeze came in the window off the lakes and hills. For me there was no heat, no sleep, no cool of night. Swallows flew through me; Sulphur butterflies fluttered through my eyes and out my mouth.
I told Nettie to quiet. Her spirit was seething still. She was Mother’s mother and she’d told me yet again how Elmer Stark came to the farmhouse out in Saskatchewan following on the heels of her daughter who’d stopped him on the grid road and asked him to come in and share their evening meal, a flirty girl at the fence line watching the road for a man. Nettie told me how she regarded this man, younger than her and older than her daughter, his hands resting on the kitchen table, the large knuckles and the burnished hairs on the backs of his fingers and hands, the curl of his red hair, wet with sweat, stubbled out over the collar of the blue cotton shirt she’d given him after he washed at the sink, one of the two shirts of her husband’s she’d kept in the trunk in the bedroom chiffonier.
She told me how she’d stood, gripping the back of a kitchen chair while he washed, his naked shoulders, the gleam of his skin, and the lines of charred bronze where the sun had burned his neck and wrists, the faint red-gold of the hairs that edged from under his belt at his waist. Nettie had wanted to brush against them, feel that softness on her wrists, her belly. She’d not touched nor been touched by a man in the three years since her husband hanged himself, leaving her and her young daughter, Lillian, alone on the farm. Now her daughter was seventeen and had spent spring and summer afternoons at the window or standing at the fence line looking out along the grid road that led down from Prince Albert and up from Fort Qu’Appelle.
Nettie had stood with her back to the same window with its flour-sack curtains she’d dyed orange with willow bark and chokecherries. She told me how her daughter sat at the kitchen table and watched the man she’d brought in from the correction line. Nettie said she knew her daughter thought she was the only woman in the room, her mother to her a dry leaf, a forgotten stone. They both gazed at his naked back and the hairs leading like a wedge of late-summer wheat down under his brown, sweat-stained leather belt.
She stood there and watched her daughter suddenly become a woman. Her own need was heat between her legs.
As Nettie quiets, gone back to brooding, Elmer shouts into the dirt, his story blundering among the roots. He starts in again about the sister he left behind south of the land of the little sticks, the mother who stared into his back as he walked away, knowing what would happen when his father woke. Elmer said nothing to her when she gave him a bag with a part-loaf of day-old bread, a turnip, five eggs in a jar of vinegar, and strips of smoked venison she’d had hidden away. He’d rolled an extra shirt in a scrap of blanket along with three fish hooks, fish leader wound on a stick, and his father’s short knife stripped from his father’s belt as he lay sleeping. The sheath was stained with sweat, a salt line running like a lake edge across the leather. What was there to say but that he had to go, the bruise on his cheek a mottled blue from his father’s back-handed fist thrown at him when he’d forgotten to tie up the dog. His father had been herding cattle into the pen and the dog had spooked the stock, half the steers veering off and gone into the dusk, not to be found till the next day, and then that fist again, hard across the side of his head, Elmer calling to the dog to come back, all to no avail.
The fist was nothing to what his father did three hours later when he finished a jar of moonshine, hauling him out into the bull pasture and beating him as he cursed his son. His sister, Alice, the one I was named for, had burst from the kitchen door and run across the stubble field. She had begged her father to stop, but he wouldn’t listen. Elmer found out Alice was gone when he woke up in his cot in the lean-to at the back of the house. His mother was washing the cuts in his skin. She knew where Alice was and so did Elmer. She was where he always took her, out past the barn to the empty grain shed beyond the dugout.
Elmer had lain awake in the lean-to until he heard the early howl of a coyote. The moon was gone and the hours were running to the dawn. Alice wasn’t back, his father sleeping loud behind the half-wall that separated their bed from the kitchen.
When will he let her go?
His whisper to his mother. She squatted beside him and told him not to fear, that his sister would be back later in the morning when father fetched her. Elmer looked at the chapped skin on her hands as she gave him his father’s old boots and a can with a skim of dubbin in the grooves. Take care of your boots, she’d said. They’ll save your feet on the road. She told him he had to go north before he could go south. Leave the road, she said. He’ll try to find you. Follow the creek. The creek leads to the river and the river leads to people. Remember that. Follow the upstream. The Saskatchewan River will find you a home.
It was the fear in his mother and sister that frightened him the most, what he couldn’t accept. He was afraid that it might live in him some day, that woman-fear stopping him from becoming a man. He was afraid that it might grow inside him until he became like his mother, like Alice. It never occurred to him that by leaving the farm and family it would be his father who would grow in him, like a moth grub in an apple that waits for the fruit to ripen before eating the heart.
At the fence line where it met the northwest road he almost turned aside. He’d looked into the dark where he was headed and saw it in shreds among the western clouds, the first light coming out of the east behind him in a brittle band. He k
new where his sister was and he almost turned away from the road to go to the alder-log shed by the dugout, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t go. He knew what he would find there and he knew, finding her, he would have to do something. But what could he do? He lifted the barbed wire, and ducked through, the fence between him and what he knew. His mother had told him he had but an hour to run before his father woke.
He’ll not forgive you taking his knife, she said.
He started walking again, his feet loose in his father’s old boots, the bound blanket slung over his shoulder. He was thirteen years old and would not look back, not ever.
I know, Father, I know.
Father was just a boy when he first wandered the plains. That summer he found himself in the southern foothills down near Pincher Creek where he lived a short year in an abandoned sod hut with a Métis woman and her baby, the woman a stranger kind of mother, her language a mix of Stony, Chippewa, and French. When he left, he stole his first horse from a ranch near Fort Macleod and rode east out of the spring storms into the Cypress Hills where he worked the ranch and wheat country of Palliser’s Triangle. The border meant nothing to him, Saskatchewan and Alberta, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, and Washington, they were all one country in his mind. He didn’t think he belonged to any one place. He was a wanderer and called nowhere home. When he was fifteen, he hid out in a cave on the Big Muddy down in the Badlands, piling grease-wood and sagebrush to block the blizzard winds. He lived there a winter, shooting wolves with a stolen Enfield rifle, selling their hides in Havre. In the spring, he drifted past Old Man On His Back to the Frenchman River near Eastend where he got a job on the railway for the summer. Later, he cowboyed on the McKinnon ranch, worked thresher crews near Medicine Hat and Olds, then quit and hit the trail again. He worked a season here and there, moving on from farm to ranch, from village to town, Sweetgrass, Climax, Wolf Point, Cut Bank, footloose and drifting through his younger years. He was a “stopper,” riding in alone, working a day or a week in exchange for a shed to sleep in and food for whatever horse he’d traded for or stolen.
The next year, he laboured dawn to dusk in the fields in a desert camp on the river benches near Walla Walla north of Grand Coulee. Every four hours the workers were allowed a break and found what shade there was in the lee of onion wagons where they ate their spare food and passed among themselves a tin cup dipped from one of the buckets the water-carrier, old Albertine One-Time-Song, had hauled with her yoke from the river down below. Father sat apart from the men, the women, and their curious children. He was young enough to be wary of their affections, the women because he knew the kindness they showed was only for the season, the day, and sometimes just the hour, and the men because they were jealous of anyone who might try to get close to what they owned. Father knew enough to stay to himself, far from the rags and patches of the Indians and itinerants who worked the fields before finishing the year by heading upriver to the fruit country for the autumn harvest.
The days were safe enough, but he slept careful in the dark, not knowing who might come crawling to find him. One night an early cold came creeping down from Canada and he hauled his blanket and kit over to the wagon where Albertine and her man, Seymour Dubois, slept. He curled up to the coals of their dwindling fire and lay huddled in his blanket with his knees pulled up to his chest. He lay there not sleeping as he watched two scorpions come from the sand to dance at the edge of a hot stone, then Dubois came out of the dark of his wagon and sat down across from him, a blanket pulled around his shoulders, his greasy hat tipped low on his forehead. Elmer couldn’t see his eyes clearly, only the glance of light in them, a glitter as of mica flashing under his dense brows. Elmer had filled onion sacks near Dubois for the past week and trusted him enough not to get up and move back to where he’d been before in the cold by the sagebrush. Dubois spoke out of the glow of his beard, his voice a rattle.
Looks like they’re dancing, Elmer said.
They’re not dancing, said Dubois.
The scorpions circled each other, their claws raised up and their tails curved above them, the barbs catching the fire’s light. They circled for a long time and then they grappled, claws clicking on legs, the tails jabbing down as each tried to find an opening in the other’s scales. The fight lasted only a few minutes, the larger one stinging the smaller, the dying one stretching its legs out, its barbed tail losing its high curl. The big scorpion started to drag the dead one under the shadow of a flat stone, but Dubois pushed it away with a stick, picked up the dead one, and threw it on the coals in the fire pit. He said nothing, just rolled a cigarette, Elmer watching the scorpion’s body crack open in the slender flames.
Father drifted east into Montana. It was the early Twenties and these were days he would remember as the best years he’d had, riding the rodeo circuits, winning a few dollars on bucking broncs in towns across the west. Get him drunk enough and he’d talk about a horse he’d ridden named Devil’s Child. Where had he been, Fort Qu’Appelle? Who calls. That town a question without an answer. Father said it was a rinky-dink rodeo, but what did that mean? He’d just turned seventeen, and was ready to be a hero, heading up from Chocteau, on a worn-out gelding he’d picked up outside of town. He was looking for a chance to shine and when they asked for his moniker at the rodeo grounds he gave them The Chocteau Kid, knowing the good rodeo riders had names like that.
He would always remember the horse he won on in the rodeo, Devil’s Child, and the way that stallion trembled under him, the shudder when he laid his hand on his neck. He could hear the shiver, the horse talking with his skin before they opened the gate and let them loose. Seventeen years old and riding his ten seconds on a horse that had thrown every rider that season, each man in the stands wanting to be him, riding like he was against time.
Ten American silver dollars, all of it spent in the bar that night, a hero for an hour or two as he stood drinks for the house, farm girls hanging off his arms, and then the Rambler Café the next morning, eggs and bacon, spuds and bread, and the coffee cup he could barely hold in his shaking hands, the waitress giving him seconds for free, thinking he was a cowboy down on his luck. He sold his Montana mare for next to nothing and rode the bus, following the rodeo horses to Alberta, coming in first at the Calgary Stampede, having drawn Devil’s Child again and riding him into the dust. He stayed three nights in the Palliser Hotel, riding girls in his top-floor room, their names left behind each morning in the bottom of a bottle.
Elmer knew the colour of the land in all its moods, felt the heaviness of the South Saskatchewan River, its great brown heave. He squatted in an abandoned shack one winter by the Qu’Appelle lakes, camped in the Badland coulees and in the wasteland at the edge of the Great Sand Hills. He heard the call of the loon and saw the fall of the snow geese onto the sloughs, the Canadas and curlews as they came in their millions down the sky onto the desolate prairie lakes. Going north or south, blade after blade of birds cried down until the water was so weighted by their breasts he thought the lakes themselves would rise above the earth and drown the land forever. He’d seen the dust walk the plains, a thousand-foot wall of earth moving across the fields. He lived the drought years. It seemed at times all he talked of was dust and roads.
Turner Valley was where Father found himself again, early one November. He rode in on a spavined horse and saw the snow geese come down through the blizzard sky in the wrong season, the great Alberta coulee a vast flame with black clouds rearing up and the land green in the heart of the foothills winter, men like charred sticks in the coulee as they burned the oil. Mary Bellman’s whorehouse out in nearby Dog Town was his home for six months. He worked there part-time when he wasn’t trying to put a dollar together out of nickels and pennies, sweeping floors, hauling wood, and going to one or another bar to get whiskey for the ladies. Eloise was his favourite whore, a girl with long black hair and an easy laugh. It was the way she teased him early on about how he wasn’t really a man, not yet, and him bristling at her for the way she laughe
d at him, the other girls going along with the gag and saying: Ain’t you just the prettiest boy, calling him Carrot Top, loving it when they made him blush with their fast ways, a glimpse of Eloise’s white breasts enough to drive him mad, him wanting to touch them and without money enough to try. Mary got angry at him for hanging around the girls too much, telling him to get back to work doing whatever it was she wanted done, a floor wiped down, garbage hauled to the nuisance ground, bottles taken to the men in the rooms upstairs who wanted to get drunk with their whores before heading back out to the gas fields to work or to some rooming house, tent, or tarpaper shack they were living in. If they were without shelter, they’d walk the long trail back to Turner Valley and head out to the ravine to roll up in a blanket as close as they could get to the burning oil in Hell’s Half Acre, waking up winter and summer to geese and ducks that stayed year-round to feed on grass that wouldn’t die, no matter it being thirty below out on the prairie. Mary Bellman rewarded him that summer by giving him a Sunday night with wild Eloise. In the false dawn she said she wanted to run off with him, but after a breakfast of crackers and corned beef, he packed up his bindle and headed into Calgary once more, for the Stampede and a chance to ride for money on the bareback broncs.
Father, The Chocteau Kid, hitting the circuit again.
I turn in the memory of his tellings.
But what’s a father’s witness to a dead child? What meaning was there in his hoard of words? Adventures, not confessions, his stories not a life.
There’s a leaf floated down through the air. It rides the autumn current of Cheater Creek. Boulders have washed down through the years and lie strewn across the waters below the clay bluffs beyond the bridge. The spare rains and the winds blowing up the valley have eaten the clay away and the creek has chewed the foot of the bluff, glacial gravel sliding down from the seams. The leaf follows the current through the rocks and is thrown by a brown wave into an eddy bound by stone. The current runs close by and the leaf turns and touches faster water, its crinkled edge turned back and circling there, the leaf a small boat caught. Like that leaf, his life.