by Mal Peet
Straight Speaking began to refill her pipe but changed her mind and let it rest in her lap with her thumb in its bowl. “Her mother, my daughter Alsoomse, went crazy and married a white man. He took her off to Winnipeg. You been to Winnipeg?”
“I come through it,” Beck said.
“Uh-hmm. Grace says her father was a kind man in a troubled sort of way. I wouldn’t know. I only met him once and it didn’t turn out that well. He was a railroad man, and the railroad was another kind of trouble. Grace don’t see it that way, but that’s a different and longer story. Anyways, he died and left her all his money, so some good came out of the whole sorry business. Grace came back to us and bought this piece of land. She said there was nothing here when she bought it, but she was wrong. There’s plenty here, but you can’t see it just by looking.”
She gestured with her pipe again. “This used to be a summer gathering place for our people, back when there was still hunting. Clans came from all over for the Okan. The sun dance. And to trade horses and arrange marriages and such. We kept on with the Okan even when the damn government made it illegal.” She chuckled. “We still have a whoop-up here when the chokeberries get ripe. But it ain’t a patch on the old days. You see my tipi over there?”
“Yes’m.”
“I got that put up on the selfsame spot where I lay with my first husband on our first night. I wasn’t much older’n you. I still feel him with me, now and again. Some things never lose their tickle. Ha!”
Straight Speaking fell silent. Beck thought she was thinking or remembering but she was waiting.
“Well?”
“Well what, ma’am?”
“Well, it ain’t much of a conversation when there’s only one person doing the talking. It’s your turn. Tell me about your people.”
“I dunno. I guess I don’t have any.”
“Hmm! So you sprung up full-grown out of the ground where Grace found you, that right? You never had a mother?”
“She died a long time ago.”
“And your father?”
Beck was relieved to hear the sound of the Ford returning. “I never knew him.”
“He died too?”
“I dunno.”
The old woman turned her head in his direction. “Lord, it’d be easier to squeeze piss from a log than get information out of you. Who raised you after your ma died?”
“The Sisters of Mercy,” Beck said.
“And who were they?”
“Not sisters and no mercy.”
Straight Speaking laughed, a single harsh syllable. “A hard time for a child.”
“You could say that.”
The truck pulled up in front of them. Grace got out, leaving the engine running, and came to lean on the railing of the veranda. Beck couldn’t help sneaking a look at her chest but the work shirt didn’t reveal much.
Grace said, “Okay, Nah-ah? You been interrogating our guest?”
Straight Speaking harrumphed, then spoke rapidly in their other language. Grace answered. Her grandmother spoke again. Grace nodded. “That’s what I thought, too. Okay, Beck, let’s go.”
He got to his feet reluctantly and picked up his rucksack. To Straight Speaking he said, “It was nice meeting you, ma’am.”
“Oh, I ain’t done with you yet. I’ll still be here when you get back.”
Confused, Beck looked at Grace, who said, “You won’t be needing that bag. I’m not setting you back on the road just yet.”
In the truck, Grace said, “Nah-ah said that if you were Siksika, you’d be called, ah, Closed Mouth Walking Man, something like that. I said you’d talk when you were ready, but she’s got too old to be patient. Anyway, she can talk enough for two, wouldn’t you say?” There was something bright and jittery in her voice. “I guess she told you our story. About how we ended up here in Ogygia.”
Oh-jee-jee-ya. Beck tried to fix the sound of it in his head. “Yeah,” he said. And then, “It was a tale with some trouble in it, seemed to me.”
She glanced at him. “Not anymore,” she said. They reached the road and turned onto it. “Nah-ah says that if you lose your own people you need to gather new ones around you; otherwise you turn ghost. You know what she meant by that?”
“I think so,” Beck said. He thought of Irma and Bone. The thought stabbed him, as it always did. He hadn’t seen them in more than two years.
The road turned south alongside the flank of a pine-topped ridge that gradually descended to more level terrain. The sun was halfway down the right-hand side of the sky. Peering ahead through the murky windshield, Beck saw, a mile or so ahead, a cluster of buildings. They looked like boxes someone had dumped in the middle of nowhere. Then, a couple of minutes later, two parallel gleams arcing through the low windswept billows of grassland. A railroad track.
“Cooper’s Creek,” Grace said. “It’s not much yet. A coal and water stop on the line to Calgary. A depot for incoming and outgoing freight. A holding pen. The only farm store in a hundred miles either way. But we’re getting there. Farmers are buying up land around here because of the railroad. An American oil company has been test drilling not far south of here. And over there, see?” She pointed to a group of cabins and tipis, smoke drifting from a couple of them. “Some of our people. Straight Speaking’s people. They’re here because of her, some of them. But they’re smart. They can see the way things are going. The trick is to make sure they don’t get swindled by the government every step of the way.”
The Ford jolted over the wooden traverse across the railroad track and came to a stop alongside a long and low timber building with puddles in the bare soil in front of it and a gasoline pump. A painted sign running halfway across the frontage of the building read COOPER’S CREEK FARM & GENERAL.
Grace hauled the hand brake up. Beck reached for the door handle but let go of it when Grace didn’t move.
“You got any money, Beck?” she asked.
“Some.”
“How much?”
“Three dollars fifteen cents.”
“Hmm.”
He said nothing.
“I can’t see you getting to Vancouver on three dollars fifteen cents.”
The relationship between distance and money had unraveled for Beck long ago. You made it up as you went along.
Still not looking at him, Grace said, “How about you stay awhile and work for me? I need the help and we’d feed you, build you up a bit. I pay an honest wage. Enough to get you to Vancouver, maybe. What do you think?”
She said it in a rush. It seemed to Beck there was more to what she was saying, although he couldn’t put a name to what it was.
He said, “What kind of work?”
She seemed unprepared for the question. “Farmwork. Animals. You any good with horses?”
“Not really.” He thought back to the Giggs farm and shuddered.
“You can learn. I’ve got a good man to teach you. You know anything about arable land?”
He shrugged. “I worked on a farm awhile.”
“Good,” Grace said, and smiled. “You’ll do. And Nah-ah says you have strong arms. So?” She waited like you wait in the pause between thunder and flash.
Beck nodded. “Okay,” he said.
Grace let her breath out in a kind of sigh. “Good. Come on, then. You can’t work for me looking like that.”
THE INTERIOR OF the store was so densely packed with stock that, apart from a small space inside the door, the only room for movement was along narrow aisles between walls of crates, boxes, barrels, sacks, tools, shelves of canned goods, bolts of cloth, cupboards full of potions and ammunition, reels of cord and wire, piles of bed blankets and horse blankets, cases, cans, and cookware. There were four good-size windows in the long wall, but there was so much stuff heaped up in front of them that the light was dim; the air held a complex odor of wood, grain, tar, and a musty sweetness.
At the far end of one of the shorter aisles, a man was bent over a table, writing in a book.
&nb
sp; “Hello, Ben,” Grace greeted him with a smile.
The man stood and came toward her. He was tall and angular. His dark hair hung to his shoulders; on either side of his narrow face, a thin braid ended in a bead and a red feather. He wore spectacles.
“Grace. Good to see you.”
“The tractor part I ordered come in yet?”
“Yep, and some mail. On the morning train. Train and the storm arrived the same time. That was some heck of a —” He saw Beck.
Grace said, “Ben, this is Beck.”
“Uh-huh,” Ben said, then spoke to Grace in Siksika.
She answered in English. “Beck’s on his way to Vancouver and he’s agreed to stop over a while to help out.”
Ben nodded.
“But he needs clothes.”
Ben looked Beck up and down. “I wouldn’t argue with that. What’s he need, apart from everything?”
When they drove out of Cooper’s Creek, Beck had a big bundle on his lap tied up with string, and perched on top of the bundle a pair of buckskin and leather boots with leather laces.
Grace said, “Ben’s kind of slow to warm to people. But he’s maybe the world’s best storekeeper. He knows everything in stock and where it is, down to the last tack and bean.”
Beck was thinking about how she hadn’t paid for the clothes. Ben had written it all down in a ruled book and then they’d just walked out with it. So Beck figured she owned the store, too.
They pulled up in front of the house. There was no sign of Straight Speaking.
“She’ll have gone to her tipi to rest,” Grace said. “She can’t sleep anyplace with corners. Bad medicine gathers in corners.”
They got out of the truck. Beck thought they’d go into the house but Grace said, “Come along. I’ll show you where you’re going to be.”
She led him around to the back of the house to where a track, made just by people or maybe animals walking it, sloped downhill through trees and shrubs now coming into full leaf and flower. Butterflies waltzed through the air. In no time at all they came to a longish black-painted shack fronted by a narrow veranda with three doors and three windows covered in a fine wire mesh.
Grace said, “This is our summer sleepout. When we need extra help, this is where they stay. It comes in handy during the Okan, too.” She turned around and looked at him. “The Okan is a kind of ceremony. It’s —”
“Yeah,” Beck said. “Your grandma told me about it. Something about a sun dance, goes back a long ways.”
“Yes. Good. Well.” She walked to the first of the doors and pushed it open. “I hope this will do. For now.”
The room measured about eight feet by ten. Two bunks along the longer wall, with striped blue and white tick mattresses, a pillow but no sheets. Under the window, a chest of drawers. On top of the chest, a wash bowl, a jug, and an oil lamp. The light in the room was amber, and the air was hot and woody. Grace pushed the window open and plucked at her shirt front, flapping it to cool herself.
Beck set his package down on the lower bunk and hovered uncertainly. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“Grace,” she corrected him, stooping to undo the bundle. “Ben and his fancy knots.” She dug into her pocket and brought out a clasp knife and cut the string with it. “Now then, what do we have here?”
She sorted through her purchases and selected a blue work shirt, a pair of American jeans with riveted pockets, a pair of cotton drawers with an elasticated waist, and woolen socks. She handed these things to Beck, who clutched them to his chest, fearful that this beautiful crazy woman might expect him to strip off and change into them in front of her. That maybe having seen him naked once she’d think nothing of doing it again.
Grace seemed to enjoy letting him think this for a moment or two, then she picked up the boots and walked to the door and said, “Come on.”
When they reached the lake, shadow had stolen into its western end, but elsewhere the long swathe of water gave off sparkles that gathered and separated and gathered again. On its far side, multicolored reflections trembled as if in response to birdsong.
Beck stared. He’d seen a lot of landscape in his travels and wasn’t in the habit of admiring it. Most of what he saw stretched miles ahead to the horizon, miles he had to walk through in various states of exhaustion, hunger, and fear to get to another long stretch that needed crossing. But this was different. He was staying here, for now, anyway. He could allow himself to notice its magic.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
She led him to a shack, a smaller version of the sleepout, in the shade of a willow. Its front end was supported on two short pilings to counter the slope of the ground. Three steps led up to its door. It contained little: a low bench, a piece of soap, a mirror hung from a nail. Another door led to the privy. The only light came from a small high window.
“Okay,” Grace said. “I’ll leave you to it. Wawetseka will fetch some bedclothes down for you. I’ll get started on supper. Go ahead and bathe. I reckon you’ve got half an hour before the flies come in.” She paused in the doorway. “Come up to the house when you’re ready. I’ll probably not know you.”
Beck undressed in the shack and walked down to the lake, wading in until he stood in the water up to his chest. He wriggled his toes into the soft silt between the stones. The soap smelled like cleanliness itself.
Special attention to your downstairs bits, fore and aft.
He shook the voice from his mind but obeyed it. Nice tits, the blind woman had said, and she might be right, as far as he could tell. He’d never seen a woman’s chest. Not uncovered. He’d thought about Irma’s, sometimes. He’d seen Bone stand behind her and reach around her and feel them. He felt himself start to swell. He soaped his hair and plunged his head into the cool.
Grace walked back up to the house. It was not good at all that he had awakened yearnings in her. And strange that he had been the one to do it. More than strange. Crazy. She was thirty-two years old, nearer thirty-three. He had stirred something maternal and protective in her, probably. The way she’d found him. Most likely it would pass. But she thought again of him standing naked in the swirled wheat, almost as black as the burning tree. He had come to her like some kind of omen, and she wondered what he might portend.
BECK ATE HIS evening meal with Grace and Straight Speaking, along with Grace’s housekeeper, Wawetseka; horseman, Jim Calf Robe; Sonny, Jim’s slow-witted son; farmworkers Tom and Jack (and Jack’s pregnant wife, Otter Moon); and a near-silent older man whose name Beck couldn’t pronounce but who didn’t look up in any case.
The food was plentiful and well cooked: beef stew made with beans and good brown bread to sop up the juices. Beck ate like a man who hadn’t had a decent meal in a year. He occasionally caught Grace watching him as he ate, and wondered at the mysterious agenda she seemed to have in her mind for him. When their eyes met, for the briefest instant, she looked away. But their meeting caused little ripples of pleasure that made him want to look again. What did his body know that he didn’t?
At first his stomach groaned and clenched with the regular supply of good food, but eventually it began to trust provision of the next meal enough to divert nourishment to his brain. Beck had no way of knowing that starvation enfeebles the mind as well as the body. In this new life, he began to experience a mental and spiritual rebirth, began to blossom, like a desert plant after a storm. Even the jeans that originally slipped off his hips now settled comfortably with only a piece of baling twine.
Jim Calf Robe took charge of him, showing him how to muck out a loose box without having his head kicked in. Having mastered that, he learned to groom and clean and catch and lead a horse. He shadowed Jim, paying careful heed to the way he handled the horses, how he brought them in from pasture, how he approached them from the side so they always knew where he was, how he talked to them when he picked up their feet and smoothed their coats.
To his own surprise, the fear and revulsion he’d learned at t
he Giggs farm began to subside. For one thing, Grace’s animals weren’t flea-bitten and shit-streaked; and he discovered early on that if he didn’t worry them, they didn’t worry him back. Beck learned first to move among them quietly, without arousing emotion; before long he could lead six in each hand or have one move away just with a hand pressed against a sun-warmed flank.
From Jim, Beck learned that one horse needed to be approached like this and another like that. Slowly, over days and weeks and months, he found that each horse had a set of preferences as particular as any person. That some were calm and good-natured, others spooky and insecure, and occasionally one was so wound up with nerves, you always had to watch your back.
For a boy convinced that he loathed and feared anything with four legs, his ability impressed Jim Calf Robe.
“It’s ’cause he ain’t always talking,” Jim told Grace, who wanted to know how Beck was getting on. “It’s rare enough to find a kid who’ll shut up two whole minutes in a row, but this one’s got a passion for silence.” He shrugged. “I never worked with a Negro before but I’d say he’s okay. Don’t need telling things twice. That’s something.”
And Grace had to admit that it was, and had seen Beck out with her herd holding nothing but a loop of rope, which he’d slip around some half-wild thing’s neck and lead it in, quiet as Sunday.
Jim was happy, because ninety part-wild ponies need a whole lot of handling to be ridden and bred. They were tough as knapweed, smart and weatherproof as well as handsome, and men would drive a hundred miles to buy one.
“He’s got a feel for the work?”
Jim shrugged, a bit unwilling to give his new assistant too much credit. “Seems to.”
A relieved Grace nodded. It proved that she hadn’t been too obvious a fool about Beck. Proved to herself, at least.
Beck settled into his work. He liked that if he kept still and kept his nerve, he could think his way into an animal, know the inside of its head before the animal itself had figured out what it wanted. Though most of what it wanted was food and sex, so that narrowed the possibilities.