When the others had reached him and were gathering closer, one of them nudged his arm and the egg fell from his hand, landing in a clump of bunchgrass, still intact. The timid horse had heard it, and sidled closer, surreptitiously manoeuvring through the others, and when it found the egg in the grass, it threw its head back high to swallow it, stamping the ground once.
His father straightened up, speaking through a smile, “Perfect.”
Now, six years later, Peter holds that conversation in his mind like a piece of incontrovertible evidence. He’d been following the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis for weeks without even knowing he was. The US had been debating whether or not to invade Cuba for months, while the papers printed clips of a Russian naval buildup in the Atlantic that didn’t make any sense. Then, the day before, Kennedy finally set the public straight, announcing that the world was indeed in crisis and that he had just given the Russians an ultimatum: Cuba was quarantined, lines on ocean charts were drawn, and the consequence of crossing them was firmly implied. The Russians, however, hadn’t shown any sign of stopping.
Then today, after coming home from his shift, he’d picked up The Lethbridge Herald from the doorstep, flipped through it, and within minutes had walked to the cupboard of dusted bottles and pulled the whisky from the shelf. The front page read, UNITED STATES AND RUSSIA MAY CLASH BY NIGHTFALL, with a subheading stating that both US and Soviet forces had been ordered into a “state of combat readiness and diligence.” But what had struck him the hardest was a political cartoon inside. It had pictured the two leaders of the superpowers at a poker table, the tense faces of the political world watching from the barely illuminated sidelines, the smoke of Castro’s cigar threading through the lamplight. Kennedy was sliding a teetering heap of poker chips into the centre of the table, Khrushchev eyeing him coldly above his cards. The president’s mouth was open to say the one word in quotation marks below. “Call.”
True, he didn’t know Russians in the same way his father had, but he was sure he understood them better than most people, and certainly enough to know that the world was about to see a nuclear exchange of some kind. Because the situation had already snowballed too far, too fast, and now, at the very least, one or two buttons would have to be pushed, and this, out of the simple need to maintain posture. Something, somewhere, had to be annihilated. As his father said, you cannot change a Russian’s mind, and within days, whether the world realized it or not, those missile-laden ships carving through the sea toward Cuba had come to signify the very embodiment of Russia’s political conviction, of its tenacity, of its bold and stubborn determination. Could anyone really picture such boats being snubbed, being wrist-slapped, and pointed back home like a child kicked out of a game for disregarding the rules? Not likely. No, Peter thought, sliding the newspaper onto the kitchen counter, this would come to blows. In the end, his father, thinking that they were out of Russia’s reach, had been wrong.
As it happened, Peter’s wife spent her Tuesday afternoons at a friend’s house, and the fact that she wasn’t there to spend time with, on this day of all days, seemed almost poetic. Because, as Peter was now substantiating, that was how you had to do it, you had to live like nothing was ever going to happen to you—you or anyone else you cared about. You had to buy your groceries, keep to schedules, and check your wrist for the time, all while you plodded along across this no-man’s-land of a world, with catastrophes flaring up in every direction around you. That’s what you had to do—that and nothing else. Peter was done with trying to calculate the statistical likelihood of getting hit between the frontlines. It was high. Higher than ever. And no amount of guessing or preparation could do a single thing about it.
Which, naturally enough, led him into his backyard, to sit with a bottle of whisky and watch the sky like it was Dominion Day and the fireworks had just popped from the ground and fizzled into the night sky, wavering sparks tracing them to the spot where they would detonate. There was even a part of him that was half-curious as to what it would look like, wondering if he would see the wave of destruction fanning out over the land like he’d seen on some of the safety commentaries before movies—which made you feel anything but safe—houses pulverized in microseconds, frames of instant tinder skeletons that wouldn’t even have the time to topple to the ground.
Peter returned his drunken gaze to Cedric, who was now nearing his house. And as Peter was watching him, something bizarre happened: the boy stopped in his tracks and, blinking hard, held his hands out in front of him, turning them over, inspecting them. When he was finished, he let them drop to his sides and started taking in the rest of his surroundings, pivoting in a full circle, absorbing the details of the skyline, the knee-high grass, the coulee where his companions were climbing up the other side. Then, as if remembering something, he turned directly to Peter and started walking toward him. He was walking, Peter noted, in a very different manner now, with confidence and direction, ostensibly forgetting his sore ankle altogether.
Impulsively, Peter raised his glass at this strange Johnson boy, feeling a little dizzy, a little unsteady in his chair. “Hey, kid,” he mumbled, waiting to hear what would come out of his mouth next, “here’z . . . to th’end o’the worl’ tonight.” He pushed the glass out to clink with an imaginary counterpart and took a sip.
The boy didn’t flinch at what he’d said or at his inebriation. He had walked straight toward Peter and stopped just in front of him, placing his foot—his bad foot, as far as Peter reckoned—onto the raised deck where Peter’s chair was perched. “See,” Cedric said, “the thing is, you’re wrong about that. The world’s not gonna end tonight, or tomorrow, or any time soon for that matter. Trust me.” A practised smirk, a sweep of his blond hair.
Peter shifted in his seat. “Oh yeah, kid? Wlll . . . I’m sher yer parens tellya everythin’s fine’n’dandy, but I’m afraid th’truth is—”
“No,” Cedric interrupted. “That’s not what they tell me. Not at all. In fact, if I was to go down that street right there,” he pointed, “and ask my parents about what you just said, about the world coming to an end tonight, they wouldn’t be able to reassure me in the least. Instead, they’d exchange this kind of serious look and avoid the question, which, if you think about it, is the kind of thing that would make a boy lose sleep for weeks, months even, waiting around for the world to blow up. I mean, Christ.” Cedric shook his head. “What a thing to say to a kid.”
Now Peter was squirming in his chair, feeling more than uneasy and, to his unpleasant surprise, somewhat nauseous. “Look,” he slurred, “whut I’m talk’n’bout is politics, kid, ’bout complucated . . . adult things, ’kay? ’Bout Russian boats and Kenndy and . . .” Trailing off, feeling weary, annoyed even, Peter looked over Cedric’s shoulder at the barn not far behind him, then at one of the horses he’d put out to pasture for his father. It was strange how calm the horses appeared, standing placid and regal.
Cedric cleared his throat.
Peter shook his head. “Anyweh, like isaid, these’r complucated . . . gron-up things, kid. Ya wuldn’t unerstan.”
“Oh believe me,” Cedric said, smiling, “I know all about those adult things.” He straightened up. “Just like I know this crisis’ll blow over. Like I know that, after it does, the Cold War will just build and build, long past Kennedy’s assassination, and will only dwindle away just before the Soviet Union collapses.” The boy, looking quite happy with himself, gave Peter an exaggerated wink. “That’s what I know.”
“Wha’ju . . . ? Whah?” Peter squinted.
Cedric removed his foot from the raised deck. He placed his hands in his pockets. “And I know much more than that,” he said, looking for a moment into the dry grass at his feet. “Much more. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it isn’t roses for everybody. Bad things happen. To the world. To me.” He swallowed. Then, shifting his weight, Cedric pulled a sudden finger from his pocket and pointed into Peter’s face. “But it doesn’t play out the way you think. So keep the doomsd
ay trumpeting to yourself. You hear?”
Cedric turned and started down the hill. He dipped into the draw and climbed up the other side, stepping out of the coulee and onto the road. He was still looking around at the houses and yards as if he’d never seen them before. Then, abruptly, he lost this acute focus and was looking just in front of his feet again, walking like he had been earlier, less self-assured, smaller, limping to join his friends.
Peter found himself staring down into his glass, hazily contemplating what had just happened. But, as it was, he was having a hard enough time focusing on the glass itself, the colour of the whisky blurring into a shapeless froth in his lap, let alone digesting word for word something that hadn’t made any sense at all. There was, however, a single allusion that the boy had made that kept rising in his mind; something about J.F.K. getting—stabbed, did he say, shot? Either way, Peter thought, it was laughable. Imagine, someone killing Kennedy. He was sniggering now. “Crizzy kid.”
There was, however, something troubling about the incident, something he felt quite compelled to push away. Resting his head against the back of his chair, he resumed the woozy task of watching the sky, waiting. In the pasture in front of him, one of the horses lifted its head and turned toward the clouds that hovered over the mountains, as if watching too. Its tail swished, an ear cupping to the side. Tuning into something unseen, unknown. Or tuning out.
Peter admired how the clouds above the mountains had fixed themselves onto the glass sky with such serene stillness. A stillness, in fact, thought Peter, sinking farther into his chair, that was perfect. Perfect.
( iii )
When the first of us got his licence
we stood on the driveway
passing it around like a chalice
our voices still crackling with pubescence
That night we drove beyond the city limits
into the dark where moths struck the windshield
and flashes of green eyes stopped frozen
in the ditch to watch us pass
Inside the dashboard glow pressed at the glass
with the images of our faces sated with freedom
and distorted only as much as the radio swells were
electrified with our wildness and youth and abandon
Outside the fields were strewn with hay bales
like course-haired creatures hunched over
and sleeping, oblivious to the wide-open night
and the infinite promise it held
Somewhere above the car I imagined
a meteorite slicing open a slash of sky
and sealing it up instantly
with the dwindling haze of its tail
All while we raced along at a floating speed
with our headlights opening the gravel road
the white noise of rubber on stones billowing
red dust into the tail lights to close it
Melissa was thinking a lot about poetry. About how it was the oldest art form in existence, and how, despite that, she didn’t really—really—know what it was, couldn’t define it. And she very much wanted to, wanted an answer of some kind. So she asked the one person she was sure would know. She hadn’t expected his response.
“I think,” he’d said, “we all, poets or not, have the feeling of what poetry is. We know when something poignant, something song-worthy, passes through our lives, makes one of our days more of a story worth telling than just another empty orbit of the clock. We know what poetry is when we hear it, when we see it, touch it. That much is almost simple. But what poetry is to me, personally, is the larger complex that it produces, that we are imbedded inside.
“If you think of your own life,” he continued, “you might be able to string its narration together using the exotic beads of those few, most singular moments that you’ve experienced, the big turning points, the poems, until you could look at those glass colours all butted up together, side by side. But what you don’t see looking at it—or even stop to consider—is that every human being that your path collides with at those poignant moments also has a string of beads, which is now intersecting with yours, and so is woven into it. And I think that this network of blindness to the poetry of other lives, this reluctance to penetrate such an expansive yet simple code—to admit the verse that is beneath everything, behind everyone, impelling its way through every existence, silently, cloaked and teeming—that we could exist without acknowledging this interplay around us, is, to me, exactly that: poetry. Poetry is being deaf to the extravagant choir that is behind you, below you, above you. But singing anyway. It is the collective and soundless cacophony of our solitary melodies, which is humming, even now, ringing in our ears with its almost perfect silence.”
Melissa considered his take, often. So often that she’d been thinking about it just a few minutes before her father dropped by, unannounced, after a four-year hiatus from her life. Just before she’d closed her book and stood to answer the door, hesitating at the door handle.
June 11, 1965
The policeman twisted around in his seat to speak to the two girls in the back. “Now you’re sure,” he paused, looking at each of them individually, “real sure that this is your uncle’s house?”
“Oh yeah. I couldn’t tell before cuz we drive a different way, but now . . .” Hilda Crowfeathers leaned toward the window, giving the house another thoughtful appraisal, “Yeah, that’s it. I’m sure.”
The officer looked them over skeptically, a voice crackling numbers out of the dispatch radio behind him, “That’s five-two-five at station, confirm.” He lifted his hat and scratched the line of moisture-matted hair beneath the brim. Then he gave them one last serious glance, got out, walked seriously to the front door, and rapped on it three times with a serious fist.
While his back was turned Hilda let out a stifled giggle and, as always when she smiled, used the tips of her fingers to cover her teeth, which happened to be immaculate—well aligned, large, so white they darkened the russet of her skin.
But her cousin sitting beside her, Brandy, wasn’t joining in the amusement. The truth was that, to her, things had stopped being funny ever since they were ushered into the backseat of the police car and the door—with its blank panel that was missing a window lever, ashtray, lock, and handle—was slammed shut. She wondered where this was going to end, when she would be able to return to her normal life. To the red-lined coulees she called home.
Brandy Weaseltail had grown up on the reserve, just off of the Old Agency Road, which snakes north between the river and the delicate ochre lines of the Belly Buttes. For most of her life, she had believed that every hill in the world was striated with red streaks like the ones that layered the land behind her house, and even now, at sixteen, seeing the lacklustre clay running down the ravines in other places just made her that much happier that her home was tucked between the shoulder blades of those colourful buttes.
Her family’s house had one room, three windows, and, like most residences on the Blood Indian Reserve, no running water. And because her father usually had jobs for her two older brothers—like cutting wood, hauling building supplies for his carpentry work, and hunting—the job of getting water automatically fell to her. Every morning, and sometimes late in the evening, she would walk with two plastic buckets out to the closest spring, which was a little more than a mile away, and would linger there for a long while, visiting everyone else her age in the area who was doing the same. When she left, she would lift the two buckets, one of them being slightly larger than the other, and walk lopsided back to her house, a scale tipped to one side.
She had gone to school for as long as one could on the reserve, which was until grade six. But it hadn’t been an easy time. It was a place with bizarre rules and rituals, where, to start with, they were exposed to English for the first time, and forced to speak it, with every Blackfoot word that was uttered getting them a ruthless mouthwashing, faces held over sinks, having to lick their soapy palate for hours until the tallow and
lye was finally gone from their lips. Brandy considered English an ugly language, the tone flat, the words strung together without so much as a hint of lolling melody. And if the priest and nuns weren’t speaking English, they were speaking an even stranger tongue, one that had either the letter “M” or “S” droning or whistling at the end of every syllable, a language that not a single one of the students understood or even, for that matter, knew the name of.
Her parents were Catholic, so she had at least some familiarity with the rites and ceremonies at the school, but what she could never get used to was the severity with which they were practised. There were prayers every morning, before lunch, after lunch, at the beginning of classes, of recesses, and after school; they had to constantly rehearse hymns and songs for the masses that observed a list of saints and holy days that Brandy doubted even the priest could keep track of. And they were strict, the nuns seemingly bent on catching you whispering during class or lingering outside after they’d rung the bell. If you were caught, they would stand over you, waiting until you shrank under the weight of their stare, their giant black garments flapping in the wind and framing the unnatural white of their faces. There were times that she suspected there wasn’t a single thing you could do without getting disciplined for it, and that discipline was increasingly harsh and peculiar. Atonement usually meant some kind of embarrassment, having to act out your punishment in front of the class or the entire school, standing in the corridor facing the wall while the other students scuttled through the hallway behind you. Once, having giggled during prayers, Brandy was sent out to stand in the hall for three full hours, studying the flakes of paint as they peeled away from the walls, even helping to liberate some of the blisters of gesso and letting them fall to the floor where they lay like fish scales gleaming in the flat light. She was there for so long that one of the Sisters—a different woman, a nun who had a quiet kindness to her and even seemed to like Brandy, handing her a pear whenever Brandy showed up without a lunch—touched her on the shoulder and told her she could go back into class, that she had been there long enough. When she opened the door to let Brandy in, the two nuns exchanged a severe look that wasn’t broken until the door, swivelling on its well-oiled hinges, closed soundlessly between them.
Believing Cedric Page 5