Bone Coulee (18 page)

“When do they sell the steam engine?” Abner asks.

“Tomorrow, it says in the book.” Mac leafs through the pages. “But the arrowheads are listed to sell today.”

“Steamer will likely go high,” Jeepers says.

“Hundred thousand,” Nick says. “The way things are selling.”

“Hell no,” Sid says. “Not if it goes to New York. Why, it would cost a fortune just to get it there.”

A cast-iron Case eagle mounted on the globe of the world sells for $13,000, and then Mac notices the next item.

“There you go, Mac,” Nick says. “Something Indian!”

“Not really what I’m after.”

“The arrowheads have been pulled from the sale,” the auctioneer says, but he doesn’t say why. “But we’re selling the buffalo skull. Twenty, do I hear twenty?” Several times he repeats, “Twenty, do I hear twenty? Fifteen then, do I hear fifteen? Ten? Seven-fifty?”

Mac puts his hand to his brow and raises his index finger.

“I got seven-fifty!” the auctioneer says. “Do I hear ten? Ten? Ten…? Sold then, for seven-fifty!”

“It’s all yours,” Sid says.

So he has bought a buffalo skull. His grandfather likely sold buffalo skulls just like this one. But not for seven-fifty. Maybe if he factored up the inflation….

Later that night, Mac takes the skull from his truck box and carries it down the alley to the Wilkie backyard. He knocks on their door. No one answers so he sets the skull down on the step. Angela and her mother will know who it is from. It’s not a peace pipe, not arrowheads, not a stone hammer; but a buffalo skull is a part of their heritage. He hopes they will appreciate it.

•
Chapter 20
•

F
irst thing in the morning, Abner stands at Mac’s
door, the buffalo skull shaking in his hands.

“Leave this out on your step?” Abner asks.

“Where did you find it?”

“On your step.”

“I guess they didn’t appreciate the gesture, Abner.”

“They appreciated the cage. Don’t you think? Jen says the old lady’s a decent sort, once you get to know her. I guess you’ll have to put it in your rumpus room. It’ll look good with your arrowheads.”

“Set it down, Abner, and come in and sit down. I’ll pour you a glass of apple juice.”

Abner crumples into a chair at the kitchen table, then runs his shaking fingers through his hair, picks up the glass of juice and spills half of it before he can get it to his mouth.

“You got something you want to tell me, Abner.”

“She wants an interview.”

“Jane does?”

“This afternoon.”

“Now aren’t you the man!”

“She wants to have it at the cemetery.”

“Really?” Mac glances out the kitchen window to see Esther walking up the sidewalk, and the doorbell rings.

“Yoohoo!” Esther says. “I’ve baked some cinnamon rolls.”

“Come in, Esther. I’ll put the kettle on for tea.”

“You bring that cow skull in from the farm?” she says. “What do you plan to do with it? Hang it above your entry?”

“Buffalo, Esther, not cow.” Mac turns to Abner and asks with a grin: “The cemetery?”

“Somebody’s funeral?” Esther asks.

“No,” Mac says. “Not a funeral. Abner’s going to be a celebrity. He’s going to be on television. Jane Smythe-Crothers is interviewing him out at the cemetery.”

“What are you going to talk about?” Esther asks.

“Not about quilts,” Mac says.

“She’ll want to hear about medicare,” Abner says. “Saskatchewan and medicare.”

“And the cost of my pills,” Esther says. “Make sure you bring up the cost of prescription drugs. You have any income at all, you don’t get in under the government plan.”

“Universal coverage with the NDP. No means test!”

“I think the doctors prescribe too many pills,” Esther says.

“We’re doped,” Abner says. “Chickens, turkeys, pigs, cows, the land and us people.”

“Johnny Puff has an answer?” Mac says, and his eyes twinkle.

“Get him elected,” Abner says, “and we’ll see.”

“Pastor Huff is a nice man,” Esther says. “I hope politics doesn’t
spoil him.”

“Vote for John Popoff,” Abner says. “You won’t have to worry about Huff getting spoiled.”

“Johnny Puff will need more than Esther’s vote,” Mac says.

Mac’s been out to the cemetery only twice since Peggy died. First time was when they set up the headstone, then once more to see that it hadn’t sunk into the ground. The cemetery crowns a small hill on the east side of the stink lake. Mac drives up to the gate and gets out of his truck. Abner stands by the Holt family plot. Jane motions the boom mike lower, getting it to hover just above his head. Abner’s arms and legs shake, his feet shuffle, but once he gets wound up talking his spasms slow down, and he seems composed.

“Regular United Nations, the Lakeview cemetery,” Abner says. “Belak, O’Hara, Perras, Minski, Schmidt, Rigley, Petrushka, Holt, Lahti, Chorniak….”

“The Sifton migration?” Jane asks. “During the Laurier era European settlers came here to farm?”

“Saskatchewan,” Abner says. “In Saskatchewan, all the nationalities had to work together. Stuck out on the homestead quarter, you could have the United Nations for neighbours.”

“Unique to the prairies?” Jane asks.

“Saskatchewan,” Abner says. “The helping each other part. Tommy Douglas.”

“Not just Saskatchewan,” Mac says. “It was a prairie thing.”

“Can you elaborate, Mr. Chorniak?”

“It’s Abner’s interview. I shouldn’t butt in.”

“Not at all,” Jane says. “We have Mac Chorniak with us, patriarch of the Chorniak family farm that we are featuring on this…our take on Saskatchewan. Your opinion on Mr. Holt’s comments, Mr. Chorniak.”

Mac opens up, as if he’s on coffee row where a man says anything he wants and gets away with it.

“A melting pot resulted from more than just sharing the farm work,” Mac says. “But some groups did hold to themselves. Most of the Ukrainians did, but even that is changing with each new generation. When I was a kid, Ukrainians were called
bohunks.
I did my best to shed this image; I tried to be English in every way possible. School was English. The movies were English. And so were the comic books. We were called ‘garlic-snappers’.”

“And now garlic is a health food,” Jane says. “You hated the old culture then, but would you like it back now?”

“I’d have to think about that. What values have replaced the old ones? Shopping? There is a certain nostalgia. The Indians want their culture back, but would they want to go back to living their lives around the buffalo hunt?”

“Toronto’s multicultural,” Jane says. “Half the city is foreign-born.”

“A lot of them Ukrainians making a big noise about their country’s independence,” Mac says.

He has ignored most of this noise; he’s never been into the old-country politics – the nationalists in their struggle against Russian oppression. Their parades to get people to listen. The famine never made much for news in Canada, or if it did in Toronto it didn’t make much of a dent out here, at least not with Mac’s family. His grandfather used to say that Ukrainians didn’t know who they were: Galicians? Ruthenians? Lemkos? Rusyn? Austrians? He used to say that it wasn’t Russians they were worried about; it was Poles and Jews. Mennonites lived for two hundred years in Ukraine and didn’t even know it. They thought they were living in Russia.

Some Ukrainians came later to Canada, mostly to Toronto. They came after the war. They are the ones who keep bringing up the famine. Yet Jeepers seems to know something of this history. His parents might have talked about some of these things, like how Stalin had the
Kobzars
shot because they were spreading Ukrainianism with their songs. Mac’s father paid more attention to baseball. Today it is fashionable for Saskatchewan Ukrainians to go to Ukraine to offer help. Former premier Roy Romanow was a good example in setting up programs for people to travel back and forth. Maybe Mac should consider the possibility of making such a trip, but where would he go? How would he communicate? Yet, who knows? Maybe he could find the birthplace of his grandparents.

Mac talks into the mike. “It’s too late. I’ve lost what little of the language that I knew. Once the language is gone, everything’s gone but the Easter eggs, if you have a wife or daughter who will paint them. You dig for roots when the stem has shrivelled and died. My years of trying not to be Ukrainian have made me nearly as English as Abner.”

“Your daughter-in-law tells me that you have a passion for the poetry of Taras Shevchenko.”

“Yeah, something must have stirred up the Slav still hiding in my bones. But it’s too late. Take my grandson. What is he? Irish/Ukrainian/Norwegian/Scot. He doesn’t hesitate when he’s asked for his nationality. He’s Canadian. The ingredients for his mixture were brought here in the homestead days.”

“I don’t recognize any First Nations names on the headstones,” Jane says. “Are Indians on your
United Nations
list, Mr. Holt?”

“They bury their own,” Abner says. “In their own places.”

“You have a growing indigenous population here in Saskatchewan,” Jane says. “Perhaps more so than any other place in Canada. Do you think a leader will emerge to take the province in new and positive directions, in the spirit of a Tommy Douglas?”

“He wanted for others what he wanted for himself,” Abner says. “That was Tommy Douglas.”

“Tell me about Tommy Douglas,” Jane says. “You knew him personally?”

“Tommy ate at our kitchen table when I was a boy,” Abner says. “I was in charge of putting up election signs in our constituency for over fifty years. I still am.”

“I gather you are not a supporter of the Saskatchewan Party?”

“If they had an idea. But they don’t. We had the ideas: the wheat pool, medicare, co-operatives, school dental program, the Potash Corporation to keep our profits at home instead of in Chicago….”

“Mr. Chorniak?”

“I don’t know where we are headed, to tell you the truth, and it won’t be up to me, or Abner, to decide.”

“
I want it all for myself and my friends and to hell with the rest!
That’s the Saskatchewan Party,” Abner says. “Nothing but Devine’s Conservatives with a new paint job.” He fumbles with his handkerchief, yanking and shaking it out of his pocket to wipe his mouth.

“Not new directions?” Jane says. “For the indigenous people? The youth?”

“They don’t have one idea for them other than boot camps.”

“There is a problem,” Mac says. “Car thefts, break-ins, assaults on seniors.”

“It’s the gangs,” Abner says. “We’ve nothing for these young people. We have to partner with the First Nations and learn to respect their wisdom.”

Mac walks away to look at Peggy’s grave.
Peggy Grace Chorniak, May 12, 1935–November 2, 2004. Dmytro (Mac) Chorniak, July 20, 1931– .
He wishes she were still alive to take Abner on. If anybody could, she could. If he talked about injustice and troubles, she’d tell him a few things about ‘Troubles!’

Jane follows after him. “Anything to add, Mr. Chorniak? A rebuttal? A concluding remark?”

“I’ve lived in this country all my life.” He points to the northwest, to the broad flats that stretch up to Bone Coulee. “Once there were families. Kids going to school, and those who wanted to learn something finished their schooling and went away for more and never came back.”

“People don’t co-operate any more,” Abner says.

“They had to co-operate back then,” Mac says. “One man needed his neighbours to help harvest his one hundred and sixty acres of wheat. Now one man can harvest ten thousand acres all by himself, and he has no neighbours.”

“People have changed,” Abner says. “No one gives two hoots for the next guy.”

“No, Abner,” Mac says. “Not with the neighbours we still have left. A farmer finds out he’s got stomach cancer, and the next day there are six combines taking off his crop. A house burns down, and there’s a benefit dance raising money to buy clothes for the family. A kid gets smashed up in a car accident, and there’s a sports celebrity dinner for his rehabilitation.”

“You’d agree, Mr. Holt?”

“There’s a bit of Tommy Douglas still in us,” Abner says.

“One more thing,” Jane says. “We’ve still got some time this afternoon. They told me at the university that there’s an Indian grave and medicine wheel somewhere out on a community pasture near the town of Elrose. While we’re on the subject of graves and First Nations, this might be worth seeing.”

“East Butte,” Abner says.

“You know about it?”

“We’ve been there,” Mac says. “We’ll take you.”

The drive is about an hour to the west. They come to a Texas gate at one of the entries to the community pasture and then follow a winding trail through the hills. Arriving at a high crest, they get out of the van and walk the rest of the way up to the top of East Butte.