Bone Coulee (15 page)

As John Popoff steps down from the podium, Eddy Huff steps up to shake his hand.

“You’re a hard act to follow,” Eddy says. “I’d wish you the best of luck in the upcoming election if I wasn’t running against you.”

“Must be the air,” Johnny says. “Up here the election really does seem insignificant.”

“I’m with you on that, Johnny. I wear two hats. The political one doesn’t fit up here.”

“Thank you, Johnny. Darlene, Ladies and Gentlemen. Welcome to Bone Coulee. John Popoff spoke of a milestone. It can mark distance into the past, and it can mark distance into the future. I have been chosen to read the scripture embossed on the plaque, but first off, Darlene has asked me to ask Esther Rawling to come forward to cut the ribbon and to lift the shroud cover to make the monument come to life.”

Abner and Jen Holt hang on to the ribbon as Esther snips it with her own scissors, and she lifts the cloth from the monument, folding it as neatly as she would one her own quilts. Pastor Huff takes a few moments to scan the crowd, and to scan further down into the coulee. Then he reads the scripture embossed in bronze:

“The hand of the Lord was upon me,

and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord,

and set me down in the midst of the valley

which was full of bones. (Ezekiel 37:1)”

“If the mayor will come up now,” Pastor Eddy says, “he’s going to read the dedication, and then you’ll be done with the politicians. It’s all yours, Sid.”

“Now isn’t that some introduction,” Sid says. “Maybe now that I’m up here I can preach a sermon. But I’ll start off with the dedication, and then Darlene says we’ll have some music, which is what most of you have come out for in the first place.”

Sid read the following:

THE OLD BONE TRAIL

Several routes crossed the prairie

one branch crossing through this

site. Before 1900 it was used mainly

by buffalo-bone pickers to convey

this country’s first paying “crop”

to Moose Jaw and Saskatoon. From

about 1900 to 1909 many of this

district’s homesteaders used it

to bring their effects. Later they

traversed it to take produce to

market and to bring back supplies.

In places on the raw prairie the

deep ruts are still evident.

Erected by the Duncan Agricultural Society

in cooperation with the Rural Municipality

of Duncan #255, the Village of Duncan,

and the Government of Saskatchewan.

Mac ponders over the mention of the buffalo bones being Saskatchewan’s first paying crop. He doesn’t read many books, but he did read one that Esther gave him:
East of Eden.
It caught his attention because John Steinbeck seemed to care about farmers. It really caught his attention when he realized that the author was taking farming all the way back to Adam’s sons, and how they farmed east of the Garden of Eden. Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain was a tiller of the ground. The Lord had respect for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no respect.

Then Mac hears Darlene:

“We have the honour this afternoon to hear the Amati String Quartet. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Amati Strings!”

The musicians arrange themselves beside the monument, overlooking the crowd. They look to one another and they tune to each other; who is flat and who is sharp. They draw their bows back and forth across their strings. Their fingers twist knobs that loosen and tighten the strings, until finally the rasps and squeals blend and transform, and the music starts.

The instruments not only blend with one another, but they also seem to meld into the harmony of Bone Coulee. Pleasant. Restful. Thoughtful. Long and drawn at first, and then the music quickens into a bounce. Mac imagines the
plunk, plunk, plunk
of a Ukrainian minstrel’s
kobza.

“Not bad for old instruments,” he tells Esther.

“A lot you know about classical music,” she says.

Like a sudden theme change in the music, discord swells up from the bowels of the coulee. Hundreds of crows scream in unison, swirling from one bluff top to another. Every scream of caws louder than the one before it.

Mac’s view is clear. He sees the crows. He sees the buffalo jump on the far side of the coulee, and the harvested fields beyond. He sees the stink lake a mile or so to his right, and beyond it more stubble fields, some still in swath. And even further beyond, he sees the faint outline of Duncan.

By the crows and aspen bluffs, because of last week’s rain and the uncommon warmth of this year’s October sun, Mac knows there will be mushrooms. He and Peggy used to pick them. He hears another sound, but this time it’s not crows.

“Hyyaiii! Hyyaiii!”

The yells come from the same direction, from down the trail past the old homestead, to where the trail winds around an aspen bluff. A horse-drawn cart, a replica of a Red River cart, climbs up the trail. Garth holds on to the reins. Angela’s brother Glen stands beside him in the cart. Behind them, Roseanna sits on a chair.

•
Chapter 15
•

H
aving breakfast with Angela, Roseanna laughs
quietly between bites of her toast and chokecherry jelly.

“We surprised them with Glen’s cart, eh? Métis gathered bones,
not farmers.” All the same, Roseanna can’t help but like the young man even if he is a Chorniak. It might not hurt to let him think he’s getting somewhere with her daughter, but how deep should they get with these Chorniaks? Angela goes into business with some kind of boutique, Glen tries to buy land and even Roseanna herself schemes ways to pry the stone duck loose from the old man, not to mention what the Creator has in store for him with her broken doll. In any case, she’s going with Angela this morning. They are going somewhere to tear boards off of an old barn for the boutique.

“I come with you, eh? Chorniak will be there, and I will ask him what he’s doing with the duck. I want to know what he’s doing with the duck.”

Not only is Mac there to help take boards off the old Benson barn, Garth is there too, and it’s a good thing he is. The best boards are high up on the north side. Over the years, the other three sides of the barn have sun-dried and splintered, but not the north side. They’ve brought two tall ladders, one for Garth and one for Angela.

“We’ll get the top boards first,” Garth says. “Then work our way down.”

He pries one end of a board, then tugs to work the nails loose. The board comes off, and he reaches with a playful nudge to Angela’s shoulder. She grabs the board, hanging on to it with her other hand clutched to the top rung of her ladder.

“You want me to fall?”

“Let go,” Garth says. “Sorry, I meant to scare you just a little bit, not to push you off the ladder.” Darlene reaches up to take the board from Garth.

“You two want to fall and break your necks?”

“Tell your son to smarten up,” Angela says.

Mac works under the ladders, where he rips a board off at eye level, then starts taking them off carefully, one at a time, working his way down. They are already accumulating quite a stack, and by the time they finish the north wall he figures they will have enough good boards for the ceiling and two feature walls in the boutique. Throughout this time, no one has been paying any attention to Roseanna. She said that she would stay in the truck and watch them work.

“Dammit! Stupid wheels! I should have kept the old one!” She pushes the walker over the rough ground until a wheel hits a rock, and Roseanna and the walker lurch to the side and tip over. “Eyyy! Eyyy!”

“Help her!” Darlene says.

Mac drops his pry bar, rushing to assist. Both Garth and Angela spring down off their ladders.

“Here,” Mac says. “Grab hold of my hand.” He tries to lift Roseanna to her feet, but she can only sit up. She fumbles with
the plastic lines that are tangled on the handle of the tipped walker.

“Okay, okay,” Roseanna says. “Wait.” She fixes the nozzle to her nose. “I just need time to breathe. Just time to breathe.”

Angela rearranges the oxygen line, and then steps back as if to give her mother more space to breathe. Mac steps back; all of them in a semicircle watching Roseanna’s chest heave.

“Okay,” she says. “Now help me up, Angela.”

“Take her to the truck,” Darlene says. “She needs to sit down. Here, Garth. Take her oxygen tank.”

Darlene and Angela boost Roseanna up onto the seat of the truck. Roseanna’s chest heaves all the more, and she wheezes and gasps.

“Your puffer?” Angela asks.

“Pocket,” Roseanna says, patting her coat.

She takes two puffs. In moments her agitation lessens, and she purses her lips and scoffs at Darlene and Angela, who are both leaning into the cab.

“You two have nothing better to do than stare at me?” Roseanna says.

“Can you watch her, Mac?” Darlene asks.

“Maybe I should take her to Bad Hills.”

“I didn’t have a heart attack. Can’t somebody just fall down once in a while? You would fall too if you were tied to this oxygen contraption.”

“Leg on the walker’s bent,” Mac says. “She must have fallen on it. I’ve got a pair of Vice-Grips in the glovebox. Maybe I can straighten it out.”

Mac and Roseanna sit together in the truck while the others go back to work at the barn boards. From their vantage point in the cab, they can see Garth and Angela on the ladders. Angela
struggles trying to pry a board loose. Garth gets down off his ladder
and climbs up Angela’s.

“Not a lot of room for the two of them on one ladder,” Mac says.

“Hmmph,” Roseanna says. “On a ladder yet. That is something new.”

Garth pries the board loose, but to do it he has to lean right into Angela. While he does this, he brushes his lips on her neck. Angela releases her hand from the ladder rung and slaps him on the shoulder, both of them then grabbing onto one another, and the ladder, for fear of falling off.

“Like a pair of monkeys,” Mac says. He grips his pliers to the walker’s aluminium tubing, carefully, trying not to crimp the metal.

“Angela and you found the duck, eh?”

“One of these days I’ll have to bring it over to show you.”

“Lots of things you take from down there, eh?”

Mac gives a twist to the Vice-Grips, and the tube straightens. “There,” he says. “As good as new.”

“You saw Angela’s pictures at the fair? She sure can draw, eh?”

•
Chapter 16
•

M
ac’s sleep is sporadic, whether he dozes in his
La-Z-Boy during the day or tries to sleep in his bed at night. But it is the worst just before dawn, when he falls in and out of sleep such that he’s never sure if he’s conscious or not. This morning he breaks into a cold sweat just before his dreams jar him awake, a limbo time of long moments when he only thinks he is conscious.

Angela’s mother says:

“You saw her pictures at the fair.

Angela sure can draw, eh?”

The policeman says:

“Photographs show the area that

I have referred to as the fairgrounds.”

The lawyer says:

“Did you take any measurements

between the tents?”

The policeman says:

“Going to photograph #5.

It shows the campsite….”

Mac rolls in his bed, tugging at the covers. They twist tighter and tighter, and he finally swings his feet over to the floor, his bedsheet tied around him like a rope. He stands up, leaving the crumpled swirl of blankets on the bed unmade. He dresses quickly, goes out to his truck and starts it up to drive unshaven to the café. Normally he wouldn’t do this. Normally, if he didn’t take a shower, he would at least wash his face and eat some cornflakes.

He’s half out of his driveway before he stops to gather his wits. At least he could wash his face before he shows up at coffee row looking like a zombie. He goes back into the house and puts the kettle on to boil. He’ll have a cup of instant coffee after he shaves. Fifteen minutes later, he starts his truck up a second time, and he drives to the café.

If anything can divert his thoughts, coffee row can. And this morning, in the midst of an election campaign, the banter is more animated than ever.

“The mess all started with Chrétien,” Sid says, “when he was Minister of Indian Affairs under the Trudeau government.”

“Long before that,” Pete says. “It goes back to the reserves and the treaties. Hand everything to them, free gratis.”

“We never get anything free,” Jeepers says.

“You get a free look now,” Pete says, as Jane and her cameraman enter the café. They have arrived to film a typical morning in the politics of Duncan. Jane had explained to Tung Yee that they’d likely end up using only a short clip or two, perhaps more depending how things flowed.