Bone Coulee (27 page)

“What are you babbling?” Roseanna says. “I thought you studied art at university, not to be some fancy lawyer.”

“I’m just telling him that he wouldn’t have to go to jail.”

“I didn’t do it,” Mac says again.

“How do you know you didn’t drive over him?”

“I don’t.” He pauses, and then he says, “I’ll give you the duck.”

“The duck?” Roseanna says. “Here’s your duck!”

She takes the two pieces out of a plastic bag and throws them at Mac’s feet. “You thought you were such a lover boy to give me this kewpie doll, but see what I did with it? I chopped her in half with an axe!”

“What do you want me to do?” Mac stares into the fire. He bends forward in his chair and holds shaking hands over his eyes. Snow begins to fall.

“Not so proud any more,” Roseanna says. “Eh?”

Snowflakes hiss in the flames. Angela reaches for Mac’s shoulder, stops, then slowly draws her hand away. Roseanna spits at his feet.

Mac peers up at the closed-in sky, and at the owl on its post.

“Killers!” Roseanna says.

Mac gets to his feet, bends down to pick up the two pieces of the doll and puts them in his pocket. His eyes pinch. His fists clench and unclench, and his throat tightens. His jaws clench, and his eyes fill with tears. His throat constricts all the more, and he gasps. He sobs, and the sounds escape with each unclenching of his fists until his arms bend upward and his fingers snake up his neck to press on his temples. He clutches at his hair and grabs at his cap to tear it off and hold it out in front of his face. He twists the cloth like a chunk of rope, then drops it on the ground.

“Choke, you son of a bitch,” Roseanna says.

Snowflakes melt on his forehead, and the water drips off his nose with his tears. Mac falls to his knees.

“Don’t fall in the fire,” Roseanna says, and she wheels over rough terrain down to the base of the buffalo jump.

“Leave me alone,” Mac tells Angela. He scans the terraced hillside with the ridges where countless buffalo walked for countless years and centuries, and he looks over to the tipi rings where Indians camped, and to the rock where their women scraped hides. The coulee’s not his any more. What use is it to him, or to Lee, or to Garth? Isn’t his intention to commemorate the buffalo bone trail?

“Fire’s dying out,” he tells Angela, and he adds a couple of sticks of wood. Roseanna’s burnt blanket crumbles to ashes. Mac walks down the incline to join Roseanna at the base of the buffalo jump.

“Roseanna?”

“What do you want?”

“I have a favour to ask. It’s more than a favour. Can you…?”

“What do you want now? Another duck?”

“Can you forgive me, Roseanna?”

She swipes the hair away from her face, and Mac turns his face away.

“Ah, Chorniak, you are sorry, even if you took your sweet time. What about the others? You know that Glen will talk to the lawyers. We want all people to know. We can’t bring Thomas back, but at least maybe his spirit will now find some rest.”

The snow falls thicker, and the wind seems to be picking up. Roseanna calls to Angela:

“Come down here. Chorniak says he is sorry.”

“One more thing,” Mac says, “and I’m not asking any favours. But I think I’m ready to discuss land claims.”

“This coulee, eh?”

“I don’t need it any more.”

“He doesn’t need the coulee any more,” she calls to Angela.

The snow now swirls down in sheets, and the wind howls. Angela grabs the handles of the wheelchair.

“You’ll sell the coulee?” she asks Mac.

“Not sell. Give. And a commemoration bench at the top of the jump, where a person could sit and look down into the coulee. And maybe I’ll just keep a little plot for myself in those trees. Build a little summer place....”

“I can die now,” Roseanna says.

“Don’t say that!” Angela swings the wheelchair to face uphill. Roseanna coughs, then gasps for air.

“Your tube’s slipped down,” Angela says. “Let me fix it.” She turns to Mac. “We’d better get her to the truck.”

Mac notices how the snow sweeps down from the top of the coulee, building up in drifts. “We don’t have to worry about the fire,” he says. “But getting out of here might be something else. Good thing the truck’s a four-wheel drive.”

They each grab a handle and push the wheelchair up the incline, facing into the wind and drifting snow, all the way to the truck. Roseanna coughs harder and harder.

•
Chapter 32
•

T
hey sent Roseanna to the General in Regina, the
same hospital where Bill Rawling died. Mac will visit her, but first he has a favour to ask of Esther. He has pieced together Roseanna’s doll with epoxy. But it needs clothes.

“Now you’re a dear thing to fix that doll,” Esther says as she pours Mac’s tea. “The plastic’s stained from all those years sitting out in a junk pile, and it looks like a big scar across her middle where you’ve patched her together…but a nice dress will cover that up.”

“It’s what I thought,” Mac says.

“The road’s okay with all this snow?”

“Forecast says sunny tomorrow, and Abner’s coming with me. He says the NDP Executive is meeting at Tommy Douglas House tomorrow, and he’ll stop in there while I visit Roseanna.”

She’s in a room with four beds, each one enclosed in curtains. Mac hesitates at the open doorway.

“Roseanna?”

Glen steps forward to meet him. Angela sits in a chair beside the bed, along with Charlotte and the children.

“I wonder if I could talk to your mother?” Mac asks. Glen looks to his wife, and to Angela, and he says something in Cree. Charlotte answers in Cree.

“We’ll leave you,” Glen says. “Charlotte says there’s a Robin’s Donuts on the main floor. We’ll go for coffee.”

Mac pulls up a chair and sits close. Roseanna appears to be sleeping. A tube hangs from a stand, dripping liquid into her left arm. Another tube leads to her nose. A monitor shows a green zigzag line. Mac watches for any movement on Roseanna’s face, and he hears the gurgle of her breathing.

“Can you hear me, Roseanna?” He touches her on the wrist. “Can you hear me? It’s Chorniak.”

Her head moves ever so slightly, and her eyelids flutter but her eyes stay closed.

“The picnic. Maybe we should have picked a better day….”

Her eyelids flutter once more, and her head bends forward, her lips moving with just a breath of a voice:

“That damned owl, eh?” Her head falls back, and Mac detects a trace of a smile.

“Do you mind if I take a drink of your water? My throat is kinda dry.”

She nods.

“There’s something more I gotta say. I don’t know if I should be speaking for the others, but I do know they’re worried. It’s not out of mind for them. I’d like to think they are sorry. I sure am. I’ve already told you that, but I’ll say it again. I’m sorry.”

Roseanna’s eyes open, but they look away. Her lips move, her mouth opening as she tries to talk again. Mac offers up her water glass; inserts the straw into her mouth as she attempts to drink.

“We were drunk with homebrew, but that’s no excuse. We did it. We killed Thomas. All of us.”

Her head moves slowly back and forth. She grimaces, then nods slowly up and down.

“For me the only court that matters now is yours.”

The fingers of her right hand pat the mattress, and then they clench and unclench to pat again.

“I brought it,” Mac says. He reaches into his pocket. “The duck.”

Both Mac and Roseanna grimace, but just for the moment. He opens her hand and places the duck in it. He closes her fingers. Roseanna’s eyes close, and they stay closed. Her breathing seems more relaxed, and it gurgles only intermittently.

“And one more thing.” He taps her on the arm. “You still awake?” He taps again. “Roseanna?” Her arm moves.

“Can you open your eyes just once more?” He doesn’t know exactly how to say this, but there is something he feels they have to do together, something they did once long ago.

“Can you look at me, Roseanna?”

Her fingers let go of the duck, and she lifts her arm to point to the bedside table.

“You’d like some more water?” She shakes her head. Her hand goes to the plastic line clipped to her nose, and then she points to the table again and back to her nose. She points again to the oxygen mask on the bedside table. She wants a heavier dose of oxygen. He connects the oxygen-mask line to the outlet on the wall above her head and sets the gauge to maximum. Mac holds the mask to Roseanna’s face. She breathes in and out several times, then waves her hand to lift the mask away.

“I don’t look into people’s eyes,” she says. “Just owls.”

“Just for one moment, please? Can you?”

“Why?”

“Something I have to find out.”

“One moment only,” she says, and their eyes meet.

“That’s all it was, Roseanna. One moment only. A long time ago on the eve of sports day. I won the kewpie doll at the milk-bottle toss, and you looked at me when I gave it to you. You looked at me just for a moment. Later that night I walked around the racetrack three times hoping I’d see you to have that moment again.”

“Eh?”

“It’s nothing, really. Only that moment.”

“Three times around the track?”

“One moment only.”

“That we had? You and me? I forgot about it all these years. And here I threw that broken doll at you.”

“I fixed it.”

Mac lifts her hand and places the doll in her open palm.

“A star-blanket dress,” Roseanna says, and her eyes fill with tears. Her eyes then lock onto Mac’s, and his eyes fill with tears. Roseanna’s lips move, as if trying to form words, but nothing comes. She lifts the hand that holds the duck. Slowly her hands move up and down, making it seem that the two relics dance. Finally, her hands drop to her sides and she coughs. A nurse appears and applies Roseanna’s oxygen mask back onto her face.

“No more visiting,” the nurse says. “She needs rest.”

“I’m leaving now,” Mac says. “You need rest, Roseanna. Rest.”

She pulls off the mask. The nurse attempts to put it back on, but Roseanna waves her away. She looks one final time at Mac and says, “You’re a good man, Chorniak.”

Acknowledgments

Bone Coulee
resulted from my exposure to Saskatchewan places, including a buffalo jump. I wanted to include a semblance of that culture in the novel. Maria Campbell had helped me earlier with Andrei and the Snow Walker.  I asked Carol Greyeyes, Kim Morrissey, Brenda Niskala, Valerie Creighton, and Andrea Menard, and they all read an early draft of Bone Coulee. They were gracious in their understandings of my blunders. 

Nicole Hanke-Bear invited me to the drama class in her First Nation’s school. Dana Hansen gave me a replica of a stone duck his grandmother found on the shores of Lake Diefenbaker. Anne Clark showed me quilts. Christopher Walsh explained rodeo bull-riding to me. Frank Orton showed me the buffalo jump across the coulee from his home. 

The Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation employed me part-time for ten years, where I encountered the ways and whims of farmers, and their use of the land. I saw its use to grow wheat, and I imagined its use long ago when it nourished the buffalo herds. 

Geoffrey Ursell carried me through several drafts of
Bone Coulee,
and at one point suggested I make an abrupt turn. I should narrate in the voice of a prairie farmer of Ukrainian background, rather than of English, and the narration changed.

For over two decades I’ve belonged to our Revisionists’ Writing Group in the Village of Beechy. Lois Meaden offered advice taken from her life as a rancher in the Coteau Hills. Margareta Fleuter shared her experiences from her twenty-five years of teaching school to First Nation children at Montreal Lake. And through all my time with these Revisionists, Sharon MacFarlane has dogged my work with her insistence for clarity. To my editor, Jake MacDonald, I give thanks for digging up the broken doll, and to Nik Burton for asking Jake MacDonald to be my editor.

I thank Mavis, who through all of this, has had to live with me. To all here mentioned, and to the many I’ve missed, I am ever grateful.