Red Dog, Red Dog

by Patrick Lane

  22

  read between the lines, Mother would say when he was little, cunning in her deceptions. Tom had sat beside her on the couch and stared into the book she was reading from. He could see the cramped white space between the lines of letters and he imagined a secret code embedded there like lemon writing only a flame could reveal. Learning from her was like trying to read the story of a blizzard. It was like going out into the February snow and finding the tracks of animals and birds, small stories left behind in the drifts.

  Everything you saw was the past of a winter hunt. It was the story of snow. You followed the trail of a rabbit and saw how it stopped at a red willow sapling and stood up on its two back paws to nibble the buds from the bare branches. You got close, hunkered down, and marked the cut of its sharp teeth in the bark, the delicate bites it took from next year’s leaves. The branch was bare. The rabbit stayed close to the willow and sagebrush and the tall grasses pushed up through the snow. The animal was white, the fur turned to the same cold of the land it wandered for food. Only the nose, the ear tips, could tell you where it hopped. You saw the rabbit sometimes on the snow, black specks moving like summer flies across a pure white tablecloth.

  And you followed the tracks because you were a boy and the story of the rabbit was who the rabbit used to be, as it went this way and that, and always to the spare seeds hidden inside grass heads, the alder and willow buds. You saw how the rabbit moved at last, hesitant, careful, out into the open. The rabbit had come out from the safety of the creek brush and was crossing the orchard to the other side where the old fence hung its rusted wire. There was food over there, frozen, windfall apples under the snow kicked to the margin of the field by Father one night in autumn when he was out visiting his graves.

  You stepped out into the open and followed the tracks into the field. You imagined yourself white as snow, crossing a great emptiness, imagined yourself with slender ears ending in tips of black fur, tiny reminders of the past summer, and you had a small black nose, and eyes looking to either side, seeing two landscapes, and how your mind brought them together like playing cards shuffled on a table before Eddy laid down a hand of Patience. The old fence with its fallen, tangled wire, the slender icicles hanging from the barbs, and the tall grasses were only a few hops away.

  The rabbit didn’t hear the Great Horned owl as it rode the white sky. The owl was the story of silence. And you stood there in the small disturbance and saw the outline of the grey hunter, its mark on snow. It was as if the rabbit grew sudden wings and beat them down once before lifting into the sky.

  The tracks of the rabbit stopped there and you waited. It took time to step past the broken snow and into the perfect whiteness beyond and as you did you looked behind, looked at the horizon and the sun low in the south where it crawled among the clenched branches of the poplars and the cottonwoods by the creek. You saw the sun. You looked at that pale orb riding the hills and then you moved through the unbroken snow toward the safety of the far fence and the willow and the sage, the apples, and the spare grasses.

  Rabbit stories.

  Mother had told them to him and Eddy.

  You had to watch a long time to see through her words. You’d listen to her read aloud and then you’d read between the lines to find the story beneath the story, the one she’d hidden. There were always clues, a word, a phrase or two, a small fragment that told you there was something hidden, but you had to imagine it, you had to piece it together bit by bit and supply the parts left out, the silences, the moments when she turned away and told you to go to sleep, the times you hid behind the door and listened to her and Father, the arguments, the shouts. But mostly it was the silences you found in the other rooms of the house when you had to invent what you read in their eyes, the sideways glance, the blink, the hesitation, the quick anger that told you there was something left unsaid, something you needed to know, but no matter your begging they never told you.

  Didn’t you?

  You had to find it for yourself.

  You had to find the story.

  You imagined your father still a boy and walking away from his home down a Saskatchewan road that cut in a straight line from the dwindled forest to the open plains. Father was only thirteen then, bare feet in huge boots, his father’s hunting knife strapped in the knotted baling twine that held up his threadbare pants. Tom could see him coming out of the sparse trees at the edge of the north, the Black spruce country where the deer were small and timid and there were coyotes and bears, wolverines and wolves.

  He knew almost nothing of Father’s early childhood except how he hated his father and loved his mother and his sister, Alice. And how his grandfather strung her from a beam in the barn, hung her there in the shadows, her body swinging slow, and he took the bullwhip out of the rain barrel where it was kept to keep it supple and whipped her methodically, carefully, spacing the blows so no cut touched another and how he cursed when he made a mistake as the long blade of the leather bull-cock whip crissed the air. Tom remembered the story, how his grandmother knelt in the dust and chaff at the door and begged him to stop. But Tom never learned why he whipped his daughter. That part wasn’t told, and he didn’t invent a reason because he couldn’t think of one. Tom couldn’t think of a reason why a father would do that to his daughter.

  Did Father tell that story?

  Or was it Mother? She hated Father going on about how her own father killed himself. He said her father was a coward, a worthless man who couldn’t look after his own. When he said that, Mother would retort: And what about you? When did you ever look after your family?

  The story of Alice being bullwhipped was a tale told on him, not about him. But what part of the story was his and what part Mother’s? Was it the part about the precision of the blows or the part about the dust and chaff? When she told the story, Tom could see the swirls of dust and the bits of straw and hay on the worn boards, and the barn, its dank darkness smelling of cows and horses, chickens, rats, and mice, the earless barn cats, yowling, the tips of their tails gone, frozen off by the terrible cold from the north. He could see his Aunt Alice hanging from her tied hands as her father wrote his name on her skin. He could see the grandmother he never met, still young, on her knees in the doorway of the barn, the barn door pushed partly open and the great shadow splitting her in two, half her body darkness, the other light, while she prayed to whatever god she knew for him to stop, the whip moving from her daughter’s buttocks to her thighs.

  Where were you hiding, Father? In what stall, what grain bin, straw pile, behind what harness rack? Was it you, Father, told Mother how Alice was laid down in the poplar-log lean-to behind the house, how she almost died, how her wounds took months to heal? Did you go to her? Or did you leave the barn to follow the stone-boat as the horses pulled it through the fields, your father on the other side bending to lift scattered boulders, dropping them into the sledge, and you afraid to speak her name for fear of what he’d do?

  And when you finally ran, what then? That first night, did you hide yourself away? Did you find some gulch or gully and build a fire, or were you afraid to light one for fear your father might see that small light in the darkness and track you down? Did you lie awake, thinking a rock falling was your father’s boots come walking? Were you afraid, Father? Or did your anger and your hate turn you into who you’d always be? Who were you when you were told to walk away from the bush farm, leaving behind your mother and your sister, their lives in the hands of that man. You knew what he’d do to your mother, your sister, when he found you gone. Did you know then you’d carry the memory of the boots and fists, the whip?

  What about the one time Aunt Alice came out from Saskatchewan to visit? She was always covered from ankle to throat by a long cotton dress, the top button made of pearl. Tom saw the button the rare times she lifted her head and let the sun touch it and it seemed to be a jewel then, a rare and mysterious jewel, something hard and bright she fastened there with her long white fingers each morning behind her
door. That was her, Father’s sister, girl and woman, eggless in the Eden she made of herself, a single name writ large on her living skin. She sat in the kitchen late one night and told her brother that the day she finally left the family farm she swore to herself she’d never marry, never carry a child. She said: I bear his name and that is curse enough. What? And bear another Stark into the world? That name ends with me.

  There is another story, there always is…

  She said.

  He said.

  Read between the lines.

  A rabbit takes a single hop from the shelter of the brush. It stops and sits up on its long back paws and touches the air with its black nose, nervous, testing the wind, almost ready to move into the open.

  Through a break in the clouds, Tom saw the glint of stars, little fires in the firmament, bright suns turning to ash. When he was a boy, he’d watched a meteor crash through the sky, leaving behind its bull head a breath of smoke that reached from mountain to mountain. He sat swaying on the wellhead, staring up into the night as if from the bottom of a mine shaft. How he had got from the house to the well he didn’t know, the journey beyond him.

  He could hear metal breaking, the wrench of steel coming apart, and see a car flying over a ditch, cedar fence posts ripping out of the ground, the strands of barbed wire snapping, thin whips singing as they hurt the air, a windshield bursting into a million shards, the car going over a cliff above an arroyo, rocks raining down, two hands gripping a steering wheel in fists.

  The stars were soft balls of exploded light, glistening mysteries that moved in an immense circle, always returning to their place as if tied to the North Star, the darkness everywhere being created by light as Tom tried to think of what it would mean to leave forever.

  The telephone kept ringing, and he was trying again to get up from the chair in the kitchen, but his legs this time were full of dense water, his bones melted, and as he tried to rise, he fell, and he was on his hands and knees in the house, crawling like a small child across the kitchen floor and into the living room where the telephone was on the wooden side table, the telephone screaming at him as he reached up, the ringing stopped, and a voice spoke to him: Is this the Stark residence? And he said: Yes, this is where we are, and a man asked who he was speaking to. Tom Stark, he said into the telephone, This’s Tom Stark here, and the man said he was the corporal down at the police station and he asked if Mrs. Stark was home, and Tom said, No, she’s in the bathtub, and then: What is it you want?

  The corporal didn’t say anything for a moment and Tom said, Hello? And the corporal said there’d been an accident, and Tom said, What? he said, Where? The corporal cleared his throat and said there had been a police pursuit of a speeding car out on the Coldstream Road, a green Studebaker registered to Eddy Stark, and the car had gone off the road, and the man asked him if this was where Eddy Stark lived, and Tom said, Yes, Eddy Stark lives here. He lives with us, and the corporal said that the driver of the car had died in the crash. You mean my brother? And the corporal said: Eddy Stark. The driver was Eddy Stark, and when Tom didn’t say anything because he couldn’t, suddenly not knowing how to speak, his knees hurting because he was kneeling on the floor, his hands shaking, the corporal asked him again if this was the Stark residence and was he talking to Tom Stark, as if he needed to be reassured he had the right place, the right person, and Tom held the telephone out, some creature caught in his hand, a weasel or a black-snake, and lifting it to his head again, said, Yes, this’s Tom Stark. This’s him here, and then, when the corporal didn’t say anything more, he said, I’m listening, and the corporal said, Good, but Tom didn’t know what that meant, good. What do you mean? he asked, and the corporal said, There’s been an accident, and Tom said, Where? wanting to know the precise spot on the Coldstream Road, because it mattered if it was a bad corner or the bridge over the Shuswap River or a deer stunned in the road, and, Where? he said again, the corporal somehow misunderstanding, and saying to him, Eddy Stark’s body is down at Reeves Funeral Home.

  They were quiet then, listening to each other breathe, and then the corporal coughed, clearing his throat again, asking him if he was all right. No, Tom said, No, I’m not, and he hung up.

  Because his father was shouting at him, and Mother was hiding under the stairs with Eddy. Father was carrying sacks and boxes down to the basement, potatoes and carrots, onions, cabbages, and squash rumbling into the vegetable bins. Jars of fruit glowed on the shelves beside the saws and hammers, the cans of nails and screws. His father placed the rifle in his hands and sent him out into the world, and he shot the Percheron, the horse so large he could bend his head and shoulders and pass under its belly. The huge body collapsed in on itself, the sound of it striking the earth, and he came home, Mother telling him with a smile that he was the keeper of the vineyards. You made me, he said, but she didn’t hear him offer the words. The sawdust furnace burned its fierce fire in the basement as his father dug his sisters’ graves in the orchard, boards breaking across his knee, his huge hands tearing straw from a rotten bale of hay, and Tom stopped. Father was shooting his dog, and why did he shoot Docker? He didn’t know why, and he wanted to know, but there was no one to ask, his father dead, and the red rag of his dog lying on the floor of the root cellar, as he picked up the shotgun where it leaned against the wall, the barrel smell a grey grease inside his mouth and nose. He went out into the night, his father wheeling around, the bottle in his hand a flail, and Tom, hating this man, hating what he had done, and then shooting him, shooting his father.

  It was Eddy who told him that everything would be okay, and not to think, and never to remember. But he had remembered. And he’d tried to understand, because now, right now, none of it seemed to matter.

  The sparse tales became legion in his mind, pieces of the past falling around him. He’d listened closely to the few stories he’d been given. It was strange how things came down to almost nothing, a single image that stayed alive. The moment when his father touched a stallion’s neck in Fort Qu’Appelle, and heard the horse’s flesh, both of them alive there in the chute. A young boy, his sister left behind, following the Saskatchewan River into the west with a stolen knife and boots that were too big for him.

  The stories that belonged to him were sometimes couched in curses, things always going wrong, a boy breaking his knuckles on a frozen bolt, his father telling him to put his whole body into it and Tom lifting his forty-five pounds and throwing himself onto the handle of the monkey wrench, thinking praise could be gained by the blood on his childish hands. What did his father think when he took the wrench from him and broke the bolt loose from the rusted metal, laughing at his son’s uselessness, his weakness? He knew a child could never break it free. Was it the shame, the failure he saw on his son’s face? Is that what he wanted?

  Tom tried to comprehend what his father’s life had meant, but he couldn’t, he could only know that his father had guarded his secrets and carried them into the years, and that he had visited them upon Eddy and upon him and upon his Mother too. Tom closed his eyes, the vast plains spread out before him, the miles of rolling grassland, coulees ripped into it as if a hand had torn the earth open. A boy was crouched in a cave in the badlands along the border, wolf hides stretched and drying on the rocks, a pony tethered to a sagebrush, patient, hobbled, waiting for him to go on with the life he was making, the life he had made.

  Tom sat there, his sisters flying around him, spirits from another time, their cries the night he looked to as if the lights he saw glinting above him were his sisters’ eyes, small windows leading him finally to another life.

  He got up slowly and walked back to the house. When he went through the door, he saw Marilyn at the kitchen table, looking worried, a plate of half-eaten pork chop bones and partly thawed hamburger on the floor at her feet, the red dog hunched over, choking down the meat she’d placed there, growling as he came in.

  Who was it you were talking to on the phone?

  When he didn’t re
ply, she asked him what the matter was, what had happened, putting out her hand as if to stop him. What’s wrong? she said. What’s wrong?

  He didn’t stop, but walked past her to the bathroom where his mother was. He opened the door.

  Mother was sleeping in the warm water, her mouth slightly open, strands of hair floating out from her face. She seemed, as she’d always been, a stranger to him, her hair, long threads twining toward the tub walls, her wrists thin and white. He leaned forward, crazy, thinking he could just push her head under and hold her there. Tom knelt down, gripping the edge of the tub against what he knew he had to do. He could see her eyes moving under her lids. He stared at the bubbles rising from under her body, the spheres trickling up from her breasts and shoulders, her belly, hips, and thighs. The bubbles rose in tiny, imperceptible columns and Tom put his ear close and listened to them burst. The spheres held sounds, a language inside them he could almost understand: rants and canticles, outcries, teases, and wheedles. A Bible opened in his head, the fragile pages turning. He could hear his mother reading to him when he was a boy, page following page: And of thy sons that shall issue from thee, which thou shalt beget, shall they take away. Words upon words: Every wise woman buildeth her house, and on and on, Tom’s heart beating, a sledge in his skull, slow and huge, resonant, resigned.

  She opened her eyes and, startled, looked up at him.

  Mother, he whispered.

  She rose up, water streaming from her hair, and pulled the shower curtain across, a single red fish seeming to thrash in her hand, the rest swimming around her. Her bare arm reached out as she bent to snatch her housecoat from the floor. She slipped it on behind the veil, pushed the curtain aside, and stepped from the tub, water dripping from the bottom of her housecoat, her hand holding the top of it closed at her throat, shaking slightly, a tremor so small as to be almost invisible. She stood in a pool of water, her hair plastered to her skull. The hand kept trembling, and he saw her fingers gripping the collar of her housecoat tighter, his mother not wanting her body to betray her.