by Patrick Lane
I’ve listened to it a dozen, dozen times, how he sat in the bar in LaBret and heard talk of the woman on the farm with a lonely daughter. Some drunken drifter told him how the woman’s husband had hanged himself in a barn. It was the old story, the woman going out and finding her man seven-stepping the air, then her cutting him down, the weight of him falling through her arms. He’d heard it many times in those days, so many he thought there must be a hanged man in each barn or house he passed, a lonely woman on every quarter-section from the Dakotas to Alberta. There was always a daughter who lay on a narrow cot each night, her hand between her legs as she imagined a man who might save her from feeding pigs, collecting eggs, and milking the cows she dreamed someday of owning, a hired man, lean and hungry hanging his arms over a corral fence, smiling at her as she passed by.
He’d heard the story and the jokes. Did you hear the one about the farmer’s daughter? Men drinking their beer and laughing. It was the same in every bar, someone sitting alone and looking for company. After a few beers he was told of the farm near Nokomis and the women living there alone.
Why did he believe the story? What made him cadge a ride on a passing truck and why did he get off the truck at the road where it swung east toward Nokomis? Why didn’t he keep riding all the way to Prince Albert? Or into Saskatoon? That’s where he thought he was going. He’d been told he’d find work there on the bridges. Why not go there? He said a man goes naturally toward trouble and it’s always a woman. He told me he didn’t know.
What happened, Elmer?
She witched me wild, he’d say. I lost my mind the day I saw her there.
She was standing at the crook of the correction line just as the drunk in the bar back in LaBret said she’d be. She stood near naked in a threadbare dress by the barbed-wire fence with her hair adrift in the wind and he followed her to the house. Sometimes she walked backward, asking him questions about where he’d been and what he’d done. She said she was going to be a dancer someday. She turned once in a spin upon her bare brown feet and stood between the sun and him. He saw her body inside that white cotton dress, the fall of her young breasts, the shadow at her groin. Lillian knew what he was seeing, spinning there on her toes.
Nettie was in the house making bread, her mother. He knew, seeing them both in the kitchen, they were hungry for a man and he knew he was good for both of them until the daughter swayed him apart with her talk of his owning the farm, the smell of her crotch rich as the crush of new-mown hay. He could have just had Nettie and the farm, but he couldn’t have both. Not in the end.
Lillian knew that, young as she was. She waited for him in the field behind the barn and lifted her dress, brazen and wild. He says his brain was between his legs back then. When was it other than that? But back then how could he turn down something sweet as her? And the farm was a good one. He knew he’d get a price for it no matter the drought.
The rope her father used was still hanging from its beam. Nettie wouldn’t have it down. The end of it where she’d cut her husband loose hung frayed like a shock of antelope hair caught on a barb of wire. Nettie told him her husband’s hair was the same colour. Elmer thought it’s why she left it hanging there. He’d watch it catch the breeze coming through the open doors. It swung there as if waiting for another man to hang himself. He told me he should’ve taken to the road the night the rope danced with blue fire, a storm passing over, lightning walking on its spider legs across the land, the thunder a fitful groan.
11
it was just past eleven-thirty when Tom left the bar and drove back up Priest Valley Road, turning down the driveway through the trees to the clearing and the old man’s house. Tom pulled in with his lights off. There was a beaten-up logging truck parked in front of the house, its front end up on blocks, old cables hanging down from the log-stakes in rusted coils. It looked like it hadn’t moved in years. He parked between it and the house. When he’d passed by Jim Garofalo’s place, it had one dim light glowing above the awning over the door of the shop, everything else had been dark.
Tom stared through the windshield at the old man’s house with its shallow roof, nothing above the main floor but an attic. There was a body in one of those rooms. He listened, but there was no sound to be heard other than the crickets. He imagined Harry opening the trunk of the Coupe and taking a hammer from his toolbox, Eddy beside him with Lester Coombs’ .22 in his hand. He knew the power his brother must have felt as he’d held that pistol. It was for close-up work, a machine for killing a crippled animal, a man. Father had let him and Eddy use an Enfield once, out by Cheater Creek when they were kids. He was teaching them to shoot and they’d had to hold it with two hands, it was so heavy. The first time he fired the huge pistol, he knew what such a gun was for, the clutch of steel like a fist in his hands, him aiming the pistol at a chalk circle Father had drawn on the wall of a deserted shack, feeling in the jolt of the recoil what John Wayne must have felt when he was taking down some enemy facing him. He remembered how much Eddy had loved shooting the handgun and how angry his brother had been when Father lost it in a card game at the Legion.
He opened the truck door quietly. Tom knew Eddy would have made Harry go in the house first to break trail and take the danger. He knew, he didn’t know, what had happened next, and as he stared at the scarred front door he imagined the old man’s rifle shot, a crack so close it split the night. He gazed at the house and thought he heard something fall, something break, and his brother’s voice coming from one of the rooms, his outcry: You fuck! You fuck!
A fox passed through the tall grass at the corner of the house. Tom sniffed the Reynard’s raw scent, saw the bronze tail vanish behind a tangled brush pile. He took the flashlight from the glove compartment and flicked it on, the light weak, the batteries almost dead. He stepped away from the truck, looked through the trees at the empty road, and went to the back of the house. Going up the steps, he tripped on a sprung plank and fell, his left hand skidding on the boards, a nail-head ripping the skin of his palm. Shit, he muttered, and made a quick fist.
The door was ajar, and Tom drew a long breath. But he wasn’t afraid of what he would find. He’d seen bodies before, horses, bear, moose, and deer. He’d seen his own father. He went inside and closed the door behind him. The kitchen smelled like an old book left in the damp too long, the odour a clutch of mould, a smell that clogged his throat and stopped his nose. He felt with his feet on the cracked linoleum, moonlight slanting through the window panes. On the table was a plate with two gnawed pork chop bones, a scraped potato skin, and three black peas in clotted grease. An empty bottle of Old Style was by the plate, drowned flies floating in the dregs. He picked up a dish towel and pulled the cloth tight around his hand, knotting it with his teeth. He glanced down at his feet. There were spider motes and dust everywhere. Tom moved his light on the floor and caught a blink of brass by the door. He picked it up, a .308 shell casing, and put it in his pocket. One bullet then, fired when Eddy and Harry were somewhere down the hall.
His eyes followed the weak glow of the flashlight around the room. This was where Eddy and Harry had come in. He glanced down the hall to where the bedroom had to be. They would’ve gone to where they thought the money was. He could see his brother standing there with the pistol in his hand, moving it around, pointing it at shadows.
He played the light across the rusty stove and the counter, the faint beam catching on dirty dishes, stepped past the refrigerator to a door, opened it, and went in. His flashlight caught on an easy chair by a window in what he saw was a living room. It’s where Tom would have sat if he’d been living there, a clear look at the driveway so he could see anyone approaching from the road. He might have been sitting or sleeping there when he heard the cars, or maybe he woke when he heard a noise at the back door. The old man would have got the rifle then, or he had it with him already. But why didn’t he yell when he heard them? Maybe he was relieved they’d come in. Maybe he’d wished for some kind of trespass, an old man’s dream of
revenge against a world that cared nothing for his plight.
Against the far wall in the room was a green couch, its plush worn thin on the arms, and a pine table with a chipped leopard lamp standing on it. The cat’s ruby eyes flickered red in the flashlight’s passing. Around the easy chair were piles of old magazines, on a side table a crumpled pack of Sportsmans and an ashtray full of butts. The room had the same stink as Father, an unwashed, rancid haze, cheap tobacco, a bad lung smell, charred breath. There was a Queen Heater with a cone of ash on the floor in front of the vent. The ashes had to have been there since spring when the stove had been last lit.
The room looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned in years, the old man sitting alone in there, day by night by day, his house draped around him like a funeral shroud. Tom clenched his eyes, opened them slowly, and followed the flashlight back through the kitchen and down the hall, briefly illuminating rooms, one cluttered with rotting cardboard boxes, discarded clothing, heaps of old magazines and newspapers, another room empty but for stacked crockery in a corner beside a damaged chest, the drawers pulled out and piled under a window, a single grey work sock, the toe missing, hanging from the lip of the top drawer, and then a bathroom, the toilet rank, the sink cracked, the tap dripping. The closet halfway down the hall was empty except for a woman’s winter coat on a bent hanger. Moths fluttered into the beam of light.
In the room at the end was a bed with a crumpled mass of sheets, a worn blanket on the floor, partly under the bed, and a pillow resting against the headboard. The bed had been pulled out and sat crooked to the wall behind it. The old man smell was everywhere. It brought Father back and Tom didn’t want him there any more than he wanted his brother.
On one wall was a photograph framed in carved wood, the picture slipped down inside the glass. It was of a man and woman standing by a Model A Ford. The woman was wearing a dress with what looked like beads sewn on it, her hair combed back on the sides as if creamed with oil. She was wearing a necklace, jewels glinting in the woven chains, one stone larger than the rest, a teardrop hanging at the top of her breasts. She had a teasing look, one pretending to a wildness she didn’t have but for being with him. The man’s stance, arms crossed upon his chest, said he owned what was his: the woman, the car, the dirt road he stood on, his fists, his lidded eyes. Behind them the flat land rolled away toward a high storm of dust, a ragged fringe behind them dropped across the sun. Mother had a picture like it of her parents. She’d been a little girl in the photograph, small beside her mother’s long dress, the land receding, little or nothing in their eyes. It was the farm near Nokomis, far north of the Dakota badlands and Montana, the clapboard house behind the three of them, where Mother was born, the dwelling small against the sky. The picture on the wall had to be the old man when he was younger, and the woman with him, likely his wife, once alive, was now dead or simply gone. The woman and the man in the photo graph were forever lost. All that remained was this picture on the wall or others in a book somewhere, an album hidden away, the past reduced to bits of seized memory, rigid images and nothing more, reminders of other days that made the old man all the more bitter for looking at who he’d been once, what he’d become.
This was where you dreamed, he thought, and he turned off the flashlight and lay down on the bed, his head resting in the furrow left behind in the pillow. Tom saw through the old man’s rheumy eyes, and imagined another photograph, two children and a woman sitting on a blanket on an alkali beach in a wallow between low hills. The children, boys, wore knit bathing suits tied to their middle by cotton belts just like he and Eddy had worn when they were kids. The boys’ legs and hummingbird chests were bare. They shone with soapy salt. They were laughing, excited by their picture being taken. The woman’s eyes seemed guarded as she looked at the camera. As Tom lay there he felt like a seed swimming inside the old man, the anger he’d held at a world he thought had wronged him. The rage swirled inside him, what the man had wrought upon them all, his woman, those boys, himself.
He wondered who had taken it, the picture, that rock-strewn beach so barren, not a bush or tree, not a soul in sight but them. But someone had, a stranger, a boy maybe, drifting past in old boots and threadbare clothes, the sack over his shoulder limp but for a few gnarled potatoes and a half-eaten turnip in the bottom, banging against his skinny back. Some kid like his father had been, one who, for a penny or two, would hold the box camera and look down into the finder, a finger’s blink on the button, and the boy continuing on as his father must have gone on when he was himself adrift on the vast plains.
He remembered one of the few stories his father told him. It was about a woman with a little girl, someone who had watched over him for a few months when he was a boy. Had he been with them near Drumheller or was it Medicine Hat? Or had they lived nowhere and just wandered the road allowance begging from passing trucks and wagons, the back doors of farmhouses. He couldn’t remember if his father said. What he did say was that she’d found him hungry by the Old Man River, crouched beside the stringy legs of a sagebrush, some woman wearing a man’s boots and with a child trailing along behind her. Back at her fire under the edge of a coulee she fed him dried horse meat, half of a huge carrot, and two raw grouse eggs sucked out of holes she poked in them with the nail on her little finger. It was the first time he’d eaten meat or eggs in days. How old was Father then? Tom didn’t know, nor did he know how long Father had travelled with her, only that one night he had taken what coins the woman had secreted away in her rawhide purse, and then disappeared into the dark, only to appear in Fort Macleod where he cleaned stables at the rodeo there and earned a dollar catching a greased pig, people laughing at him as he bore the squealing animal to the judges by the corral fence. Stories, none of them making sense but for the telling of them, Father taking a few drinks more from his bottle and never finishing the tale, Tom sitting there with his fingers gripped together, rapt.
Tom lifted up off the pillow and swung his feet down, suddenly something more beneath his shoe than the ragged wool of the blanket. He moved the blanket back with his foot, and looked down at a hand, the fingers bent. He stood and pushed the bed back against the wall. The old man lay there on his side, one fist against his chest and the other arm sprawled. Blood was streaked down the side of his head, a small pool spread around his cheek.
Then the rifle fired again, the sound of it huge in the room, and Tom heard bare feet moving, the sound of a lever-action, the snick-snack of oiled steel pulled back to eject a spent shell and push another into the chamber. He could see Harry duck into the corner as the man came down the hall and turned at the doorway, firing blindly into the room. His brother shot him where he stood.
No, Tom said, unable to stop anything.
The man stood there stunned, the rifle lowered to his waist, his hand still moving, jacking out the spent shell. Tom could see the worn hand tremble from clutched fingers to wrist. His blood blubbered in the grey stubble beside his ear and his locked jaw.
Father.
Mother had said nothing to Tom when she came down to the well that night in the fall when his dog was killed. There was no anger in her, no punishment. What concern she had was for him to hide Father away. There was to be no trace of him. She said to dig a hole and bury him, and they dragged him into the orchard. What terror was there as he struggled with Eddy to pull that body through the grass? Father had left two ruts in the dirt with his tired boot heels, Eddy hauling from one wrist and him from the other. When they got to the apple tree by his sisters’ graves, Tom got down on all fours and stared into Father’s skull. What thoughts Father had were hidden too deep to save anyone.
They say the brain lives longer than the tongue, Tom said aloud now. It was as if he was explaining some mystery to himself. It’s like hair, he thought. Mother says hair keeps growing after the dying. And he saw Father then in his grave, his hair like thin roots growing through the soil, parts of his brain scattered in the grass by the well, ants and beetles collecting it, taki
ng his thoughts into their tunnels where his father’s dreams nourished the garden’s worms.
He spoke to his father. He was sure he had heard him, though his words were only vibrations of his breath, a story told to the part of Father that moved his right arm, another story told to the part that moved his eyes, his hands, his lungs. Eddy had sat there leaning against an apple tree, turning back the cuffs of his shirt. Tom had dug the grave. It wasn’t shame that drove him, it was fear. He wanted him gone. He wanted him not to come back.
Where was Mother? Gone back to the house, or was she in the garden among the vines and tendrils of the runner beans as they climbed the summer corn? He could hear the corn talking as it grew, the sound of wet sand grinding in the leaves. Or was she at the kitchen table pouring a glass of whiskey as she waited for them to return? What were her thoughts, Father dead, the silence around her, her hand on a young cob of corn, her mouth tasting the smoke in the whiskey. Or was she in her room on the bed, the first hour of a next, another life?
Quiet sometimes is a whole universe. It’s a huge thing held in without pain. Tom remembered sitting beside his father in the dry grass. Eddy had come down from the house and touched him. It was a caress that a girl would give when she’s curious what a boy might be thinking, a touch that asks him to leave the far place he’s in and come back to the world. And he had come back, Eddy telling him to forget what he had done.
The old man’s eyes were wide open, staring up at the window. He was looking at what was his, an orchard gone wild, a rutted driveway, a strange car under the apple tree, the side of his logging truck, the rust streak on its passenger door, the one broken headlight he’d been going to fix for the past two years, the ribs, spine, hooves, and horns of a deer kill he’d made in spring just beyond in the dusty grass, and the hills across the valley rising brown toward a waning moon they couldn’t reach, not yet.