A Hard Witching (2 page)

“Max,” he said unexpectedly one night, as he and my grandfather leaned over a card table playing rookie, “get my glasses from the bedroom.”

It was quite late on an evening in December, and the house was dark except for the old teardrop floor lamp that stood in the corner behind Uncle Aloetius’ chair and the faint, almost-pretty green glow of the neighbours’ Christmas lights coming through the front room windows layered over heavily with ice. “The Little Drummer Boy,” our favourite carol, played softly on the turntable, but sounded fuzzy because Uncle Aloetius needed to replace the needle. Every so often it would skip, and either Grandpa or Uncle Aloetius would thump his boot against the floor to fix it. The air was stuffy and old, and my skin itched hotly beneath my long underwear. Neither Max nor I had removed our parkas, and we held our toques and mittens between our knees hopefully, as though we would be leaving any second.

“Max,” Uncle Aloetius repeated, “go get my glasses.”

Max did not move. Though I couldn’t see his face from where I was sitting on the other side of Grandpa, I knew how he would look, his lips stretched tight and pale with anxiety.

“I’ll get them,” I offered quickly.

“Max can do it,” Grandpa said reasonably, taking a drink from the tumbler of warm rye and coke at his elbow. He shuffled neatly through the deck a couple of times with his thumbs and looked down at Max, who still had not moved.

“Max!” he said.

I clenched my jaw, knowing Max would cry, knowing his tears would bring all kinds of anger and derision down upon both our heads: the candy-assed kids from the city, the crybabies, the chickenshits.

“Get Uncle’s glasses,” Grandpa barked, elbowing Max in the shoulder. “What are you waiting for?”

I looked across the table at Uncle Aloetius, expecting that old scornful look of disdain. But he was staring at my grandfather, looking at him with a raw kind of emotion, part resentment, part relief, his face open like a wound. And I thought, for the first time, with absolute amazement, They’re
brothers.
I was so shocked to think of them that way, to make such a blood discovery, so embarrassed to see Uncle Aloetius naked, almost needful, that, without thinking, I grabbed at my grandfather’s wrist.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

But no one heard me. On the turntable, the record had begun to skip at the chorus. Max stood, paused a moment, not looking at anybody, and then walked slowly down the dark hallway toward the bedroom, his snowsuit rasping with each step, the record continuing to skip and the three of us staring after him, as if we were momentarily suspended and preserved in that cold green winter light.

When Max returned, grim-faced, glasses in hand, Grandpa thumped his boot against the floor, and the music and the card playing resumed, steadily, as if nothing in that room had changed.

They were the only boys in a family of five, one of those typical Saskatchewan farm families, except that neither Grandpa nor Uncle Aloetius ever had any interest in farming. So when the time came, the land was divided among the three girls and their husbands—who
did
want to farm, as the girls were quick to point out—and the boys were left to make their own ways. Grandpa got on almost immediately with the R.M. (meaning, Grandma explained, “rural municipality,” not “arm,” as Max and I had thought), doing road service, a good, steady job, and Uncle Aloetius wandered around to Kindersley and Swift Current and Lethbridge, finally getting work at the pottery in Medicine Hat, where he settled. It wasn’t clear exactly where he’d met Aunt Cherry, but she was with him when he arrived in Medicine Hat. They rented a tiny apartment across from the old stockyards on Foundry Street and were married soon after, at the family homestead in Saskatchewan. They did not linger after the wedding, but returned to the city and their little apartment, which no doubt stank all day of manure and slaughter.

They wouldn’t have seen much of each other in those early years, Grandpa and Uncle Aloetius. Holidays maybe, the occasional weekend, more often once Grandpa bought a car. Everyone thought Uncle Aloetius had moved to Medicine Hat for good. Even after Cherry left, no one expected him to come home. And he didn’t. I imagined him alone in that little two-room apartment, smelling the hot dark smell of animal flesh that got into his clothes and his hair and his skin, that left a faint taste in the food he ate; imagined him listening all night to the moaning of cattle penned shank to shank in the heat and the rain and the snow, and beneath that another sound, lower,
the constant hum of flies. No one could figure out what made him stay, but stay he did.

So when he bought that little house just four blocks from Grandpa, turning up one day with his belongings packed roof-high into the back of his old white Pontiac, we were all surprised. “Why would I live there,” he said in response, meaning Medicine Hat, “when I can live here at half the price and none of the headache?” For Uncle Aloetius had never made any bones about his distaste for the city, in spite of the fact that he’d lived there nearly forty years.

“Those people,” he’d say in disgust, and swat his hand through the air.

By the time Aunt Cherry had left Uncle Aloetius to go back east to Ontario, Grandpa had met and married Grandma. They had three children, two who died in infancy and the third, my father. This was after the war, during that brief time of good rainfall and good wheat prices, and Grandpa and Grandma were busy managing their own lives, their little family. Grandpa built them a house across from the lumberyard—a small two-storey frame house—and planted an enormous garden out back from which Grandma put up pickles and preserves each fall. From what my grandmother told me in later years, it sounded like a good life, though her memory might have been taking the edge off things, as memory does.

A few years after Grandpa died, she told me she’d known him almost a year before she was aware he had a brother.

“Your grandpa had come down to see me once,” she said, “just after he bought that car, that awful old thing, and he said, ‘Ludie, I think I’ll take a ride over to Medicine Hat next week, if you want to come.’ We were engaged by then, of
course, so I said, ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ and he said, ‘I guess there’ll be room for both of us with Aloise,’ and I said, ‘Aloise? Who’s Aloise?’ and he just looked around a bit and then he said, ‘My brother.’”

Grandpa had never shared Uncle Aloetius’ penchant for collecting, but he occasionally joined him on his meandering walks through the Sand Hills north of town or in the deep, stratified coulees of the river hills. If Max and I happened to be visiting, we were expected to participate. Though we hated those long, hot, agonizingly boring walks, whether through the Sand Hills or the river hills, we always chose the Sand Hills if consulted. For one reason, there were no rattlers, curled like fat grey muscles behind rocks and beneath ground cedar, and no bull snakes either, which, though harmless (as Grandpa continually pointed out), could startle us both into tears by appearing suddenly in the sagebrush at our feet, long and black and thick as a man’s arm. For another, the Sand Hills were full of chokecherries and saskatoons, and we could sit on the great flesh-coloured dunes, writing our names with sticks and letting the hot, soft sand squish up between our toes, pretending to be marooned on a desert island, pretending the dry, rolling scrubland for miles around us was all water. We could pick bunches of wild rose, which smelled faintly of apples, and scurf-pea and orange sand dock to take home to our grandmother, and if we were lucky, we might see a bush hare or a buck or even a mule deer and her fawn feeding in the small shade of aspen bluffs. Usually, though, we were not allowed to wander off by ourselves or sit alone under that vast blue sky, but were expected to keep pace with my grandfather and Uncle Aloetius, who, much to our dismay, did not walk
on the dunes at all. They preferred to poke through the brush, where we were subjected to the awful zinging of grasshoppers against our bare legs and arms and faces and where, as Uncle Aloetius claimed, we were more likely to find some good thing: antelope prongs bleached white by the sun or petrified snail shells or even a Clovis point.

“What’s a Clovis point, anyway?” Max asked me one day—in that last summer before Uncle Aloetius died—as we minced along behind him, eyes glued to the ground, ever wary of a chance rattler that may have found its way up from the river hills, or of other terrible discoveries: a dead kangaroo rat or a salamander or simply cow shit.

“An arrowhead,” I said, “I think.”

Grandpa was off to the side a few feet, but Uncle Aloetius looked at us over his shoulder.

“About yay big.” He held up his thumb. “Shaped,” he said, “like your tongue.”

Max felt his tongue.

“But chipped around the base, like so. For hunting.” He raised his arms in an absurd gesture meant, we assumed, to denote great size.
“Voolly mammet.”

“Really?” Max said. “Woolly mammoths?”

“Yah.” Uncle Aloetius nodded. “Ten thousand years old. More.” He stopped walking and turned to stare out across the field. “They used to be all over here.” He swung his walking stick through the air. “Before that,” he said, “it was all ice. There was nothing.”

Max looked at him in disbelief. “Where did it go, all the ice?”

Uncle Aloetius shrugged. “Melted. Dried up. Ran away. Now there’s just the river.”

“And buffalo?” Max asked. “Was there buffalo?”

“That was later.” Uncle Aloetius scowled, though you could
see he was pleased. “Thousands of years. Prehistoric times. There’s rubbing stones still. In the glacial tillage.” He stopped and frowned down at us. “You know what that is?”

“Yeah,” Max said, “sure.”

I glared at him.

“And teepee rings,” Uncle Aloetius said, walking again. “It took seven, eight buffalo hides to make a teepee. Cartilage to sew it together. Bones and hooves to make glue. The stomach for a water pouch. Or a cooking pot. They wasted nothing,” he added proudly, as if it had all been under his personal supervision.

“What did they use the heart for?” Max asked.

“They ate it,” he said, “of course. Same as
kow harst.”

I grimaced at Max, ready to band in solidarity against the detested cow heart Grandma sometimes sliced, breaded and fried at Grandpa’s or Uncle Aloetius’ request. But he had trotted ahead to walk abreast of Uncle Aloetius. Grandpa stopped a few feet away.

“It was a special treat, buffalo heart,” Uncle Aloetius said, “for an honoured brave. Or some favoured member of the tribe.”

“They ate it?” Max asked.

“Didn’t I just say so?”

“Raw,” Max asked, “or cooked?”

Grandpa walked over, took the canteen Uncle Aloetius carried slung across his shoulder. “When we were young,” he interrupted, taking a big swig of water, “we used to come out here for fun, eh, Aloise?” He pointed to the highest of the dunes, which rose maybe fifteen metres or so above us. “We’d bring boards,” he said, “and slide down.”

“In the winter?” I asked.

“Summer, too,” he said. “Or we’d just roll down. We’d roll the girls down. Like barrels. Remember that? They would scream.”

Uncle Aloetius nodded.

“They would tie their skirts like so between their knees and we would roll them down and they would scream. They’d come up with sand in their hair and in their mouths. And laugh. Then we’d have a fire, maybe. Aloise,” he said, “remember? Remember Eleanor Gutbergen? Huh?”

Uncle Aloetius shrugged.

Grandpa tipped his head toward Uncle Aloetius. “He remembers. All those girls, Eleanor Gutbergen. They all chased him. He was always the favourite.”

Uncle Aloetius said nothing, just kept jabbing that stick around, turning over rocks, lifting branches of sage and ground cedar.

“We had fun times out here, eh, Aloise?”

“Did you ever find a Clovis point?” Max asked.

“Go.” Grandpa nodded toward the dune. “Roll down. It’s fun.”

Max and I looked at each other.

“Go on,” he said, smiling, though his voice sounded angry for some reason. “Try it.”

Max and I walked slowly toward the dune, the sun beating down heavily on our heads. I touched the top of my hair. It was hot.

“Go on,” Grandpa said.

Max started up the hill, leaning forward, using his hands against the incline for balance, his feet sinking to the ankles in sand. I looked down at my short skirt. It would be impossible to tie it between my knees, and I became furious suddenly that I had not worn shorts. I glanced back to see whether Grandpa would force me to go, but he was shading his eyes, peering up at Max, silhouetted now by the sun. Uncle Aloetius stood next to him, looking up also. And it occurred to me that neither of them would care whether I went up or not.

“Okay,” Grandpa said when Max was poised at the top of the dune. “Just lay down and roll. Keep your arms straight at your sides.”

For a moment, I thought Max would do it—it seemed as though he would. But then he just stood there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Grandpa called up, “it won’t kill you. It’s sand. The girls used to do it.”

Max scratched the back of his arm.

“Did Grandma ever do it?”

“Grandma?” Grandpa said. “How the hell should I know? Probably.”

Max stared down at us.

“Did Aunt Cherry?”

I started at the sound of that rarely heard name, surprised that Max would say it. Grandpa opened his mouth, snapped it shut. Uncle Aloetius kept looking up at Max as if he hadn’t heard, or hadn’t cared. Max stood at the top of the dune, waiting.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Grandpa said again, but more quietly now. “Walk down, then.”

Max hesitated, then scrambled down the hill, sliding most of the way, the sand rushing before him in a smooth, hot sheet. When he reached the bottom, I whispered, “Why’d you say that? Why’d you bring up Aunt Cherry?” But he just walked over to Uncle Aloetius and asked, “What colour was it? The Clovis point?”

Grandpa frowned. “We should get back, not?”

“Yah.” Uncle Aloetius shrugged. “If you want to get back.”