Bone Coulee (7 page)

This afternoon Mac is taking Esther out to the coulee, and he can listen to her troubles to get his mind off his own. He’s taking her to the west side of the coulee. She’s on the plaque committee, and he needs her opinion. The Rawlings were neighbours when he and Peggy still lived out there, so Esther knows the area well. She also has a good sense of local history, and no one’s going to dispute her opinion.

Besides that, she needs an outing to get her mind off her son in Vancouver. It’s not that long ago that her husband passed away, and now Cameron’s close to dying from a disease nobody wants to talk about, other than to point fingers. There’s no dignity in Cameron’s illness – what those people get – and Esther knows that he is going to die.

Mac eases back in his La-Z-Boy. The October sun radiates through the living-room window, warming him, and soon he’s snoring, deeply drawn into a dream. He’s in a courthouse, awaiting the silent entry of the judge, the only sound the
tick tock, tick tock, tick tock
of a pendulum clock. A brass chandelier hangs from a domed ceiling, the ceiling surrounded with a frieze of ropes and leaves and sharply petalled roses.

The judge enters, pausing to study the room before he sits down behind a large oak desk. Above his head hangs a picture of King George and Queen Mary, and another of the wheat sheaves of the Saskatchewan coat of arms. A policeman reads evidence:

“There were a number of beer bottles…you

can see them lying under the wagon in

photograph 15….”

A lawyer asks a question:

“…the ruling is that I am not allowed to

call the witnesses…?”

A clerk of the court announces:

“Mac Chorniak, do you swear to…do you

swear…do you swear…do you swear to

tell…?”

Mac bolts from his chair. The sun blinds him. He covers his eyes and wipes his wet brow. He looks at his watch. Eleven thirty and Esther doesn’t expect him until after lunch. He won’t bother to eat anything; the way he’s shaking he could swear that he’s Abner’s twin brother. Mac’s got to get out of the house.

He drives around town like a policeman on patrol, making sure that everything’s in order, everything in place like it’s always been. Of course it’s not the same as it has always been, but the changes have been gradual. Decay never happens all at once. Things just get ripe until they’re at their best. It’s the final stages you don’t want.

Rigley Motors is no longer much of anything. Sid sold gasoline until the tanks started leaking; it would cost a fortune to dig them up and haul away the contaminated dirt, and it took Sid all the legal wrangling he could fabricate in his capacity as mayor to keep the environmental watchdogs at bay.

Both Ford and John Deere pulled out years ago, when the dealerships were centralized in Bad Hills. In 1928 Sid’s grandfather sold more cars than any other Ford dealership in the province. Mac’s father bought the last new car sold in Duncan, from Sid’s father, a 1954 blue-and-white Fairlane. Now the windows on the building are boarded up. The glass on the gas pumps is broken, the price on one of the pumps still showing $1.13 per gallon. Sid was smart to get his father to buy land for him in 1954 and have Mac farm it for him.

At what used to be the main intersection, three buildings are no longer there: Pearson’s Hardware, the Toronto-Dominion Bank and the CNR station. On a Saturday night people gathered at this intersection like iron filings on a magnet. There has been one improvement. Fifty years ago the town hauled in clay to put a proper bed under the street running north from the bank.

It looks like the grass needs cutting again at the fairgrounds. They’ve had too much rain; just like it was back in the fifties, when how many ball games got rained out? And the Casey Shows truck got stuck in the street. And the Indian camp was off just east of the grounds in those poplar trees….

He drives from the fairgrounds up the street towards the empty lot where the CNR station once stood. He parks the truck alongside the election posters. And he takes out a pen to write on the back of an envelope. His imagination wanders. Mac’s content to muse with what he considers his own private, self-indulgent foolishness. How would Taras Shevchenko have seen Duncan? Mac writes on the envelope:

Saturday night

A swarm and sprawl, voices chatter

Fried onion smell of Chinese Denver

Car exhaust, train engine cinders

Evening In Paris perfume

Boys throwing crabapples

That came by train back then

Years pass on years

Crabapple tree in senior’s yard

Heavy with fruit that no one picks

Maple trees in senior’s yard near death

Sap drips on truck windshield

Cobwebs

Wind, dead leaves fall

He sets the envelope on the dash and resumes his patrol. Every street. Up one, down another, his eyes on the windows of houses; some with drapes drawn, some not, some empty like a blind man’s eyes.

When he drives up Esther’s street, she’s standing on the sidewalk waiting for him. He pulls up to the curb and reaches over the seat to open the passenger door. Esther lifts one leg up, but that’s as far as she gets.

“Grab the handle, just above the door there,” Mac says. “And here. Give me your other hand and I’ll pull.”

It’s not a common thing for a man and woman their ages to be driving out of town together, unless they have romantic interests. In every day and age it happens all the time. But that’s just not so with Mac and Esther. It may have entered their minds fifty years ago, but who doesn’t fantasize now and then.

“Jen tells me that you took Abner out to look for a place to put the monument. You know, Mac, I haven’t been out there since Bill died. That’s ten years this coming December.”

Esther doesn’t stop talking the whole drive out to Bone Coulee. “Everything’s gone. Schoolhouse. Our old yard plowed under. I see at least you haven’t plowed up the Chorniak homestead.”

“Now that would be silly. But what do you think? The marker up here at the top, or back at the grid road where there’s more traffic?”

“You can still see the trail marks here,” Esther says. “It would make more sense right here. And the view from here…down into the coulee….”

“It’s what I thought.”

“We should have waited lunch and had a picnic,” Esther says. “Remember our Sunday picnics down there in the trees?”

“Should we drive down? I’d like to show you some things the archaeologist from the university pointed out to me when he was out last summer.”

Esther pats Mac lightly on his knee. “Maybe another day. I’ll pack a lunch, and we’ll bring Jen and Abner with us.”

“The archaeologist explained about the bones. How a grazing herd of buffalo could smell like a stockyard. Can’t you just imagine a herd tumbling down, breaking their legs, their necks?”

“Gory, I’d say. I wouldn’t even watch Bill butcher a pig.”

“Yeah, gory.”

Esther takes the envelope from the top of the dashboard.
“Saturday night,”
she reads out loud, and a smile breaks out on her face. “So you write poetry.”

“Not really poetry. No. Just some thoughts come to my head.”

“Cameron writes poetry.”

When she says this, their conversation seems to freeze. Esther’s smile disappears, and she takes on a far-away look, as if she’s hiding her thoughts. Mac hides his too. The word
gore
has taken him back, and Shevchenko comes to mind:

Then all the shame of days of old, forgotten,

Shall no more be told….

“There’s a rock down there I’d like to show you, Esther. All worn smooth from when the Indian women rubbed off what meat was left on the buffalo hides.”

“My soup on the stove!” Esther says. “Did I turn the burner off?”

“You’re making soup?”

“With the soup bones you gave me. I must have turned it off. No, I remember now. I left the burner on simmer.”

“The Indian women made soup. They’d just dig a hole in the ground and line it with a bag made of buffalo hide. They’d fill it with water and keep exchanging hot rocks to boil the soup.”

“But I’m not certain. Did I put the lid on? We’d better get back to town in case I’ve got a mess on the stove.”

It has stayed cool since the end of July, but it hasn’t frozen. The brome grass keeps growing along each side of the road. Mac can’t remember putting up hay as late as September. Some that’s been cut has been rained on, so Lee has been watching the weather forecasts and hoping for a dry spell before he cuts any more.

In the early eighties Lee, already married, came home to farm. Mac set him up with a section of land, and he and Peggy moved into town. All these years he’s farmed from town, but when Peggy got cancer he cut back almost completely. He sold all his land to Lee, with long-term payments at no interest. Sold all the land but the coulee, that is. Lee and Darlene have acquired an additional ten thousand acres since – purchased, and rented.

“Just look at that landscape,” Esther says. “See the flats? See the gleam the sun makes on the far ridge of hills?”

“And the older we get, Esther, the more it means to us. Our generation’s lifetime is invested out there.”

“Too many memories, Mac.”

They come off the grid road over the railway tracks to the highway three miles from town. Mayor Rigley has had street signs put up in Duncan, just like the ones that mark the municipal roads. There are other signs as well, on the outskirts of town:

Home of the Lakers, Intermediate C Champions 1971/1973,
the faded orange paint peeling. Another sign reads:
Home of Shawn Smith, Chicago Blackhawks.

Duncan’s not much different from a lot of other Saskatchewan towns that take this approach to measuring their success. Mac thinks it’s somewhat sad though, the condition of the signs and the way the paint is faded.

They pull into Esther’s driveway, and already Mac can hear her dog yipping. Getting down from the truck, Esther grabs the handle above her head to steady herself, and she goes to unlock the side door to her house.

“Shush now, Bridget,” she tells her dog. “We’ve got company.” Mac’s already out of the truck when she calls to him.

“Come on in, Mac. I hope the soup hasn’t simmered down to nothing.” The dog barks louder and more high pitched.

“Now you settle down, Bridget, or there’ll be no soup for you.” Bridget yips and clatters back and forth across the kitchen linoleum.

“Just as I thought,” Esther says. “I did turn off the stove. The soup won’t take a minute to heat. And don’t be taking off your shoes, Mac. They’re clean.” She reaches over Mac’s shoulder to shut the outside door, while he bends down to tie his shoes. But she doesn’t shut the door. Instead, she walks down the three porch steps to look out the door at the big dog in the new neighbours’ backyard.

“At least it’s tied up,” she says. “Brute of a dog they’ve got.”

“German Shepherd. You wouldn’t want Bridget’s pups by him.”

“And how do you want this pot of hot soup dumped on your head? With or without crackers?”

Esther ladles some of the soup into the dog’s dish and slides it under the kitchen table. Bridget touches the hot soup with the tip of her nose, only to bark, then skitter into the living room. In a moment she’s back to the table, where she watches Esther pour half a cup of cold milk into the dish.

“Dr. Kreutzer says that I should drink milk,” Esther says. “Much as I never did have much of a taste for it.”

“Yeah. You’d wonder how we survive from one doctor’s appointment to the next.”

Esther takes two bowls from the cupboard and sets them on the table, but before she fills them she takes a Kleenex and wipes imaginary dust off Cameron’s university graduation picture which sits up on the corner shelf.

“I phoned him last night,” she says.

“And how’s he doing?”

“Some of his friends were over with a cake and a bottle of expensive French wine.” She dabs her eyes with the Kleenex, then gives a touch-up to the brass picture frame.

“He never should have gone to Vancouver,” Esther says.

“You know, Esther, it’s not just anybody has the brains to be a university professor.”

“He’s on sick leave now. Has been for over a year.”

“Has he said anything about coming home?”

“Only after he’s dead. Can you believe that? He said,
Only after I’m dead!
His friends are there. I’m flying out to Vancouver on Monday. He wants me there to help make arrangements…. Mac, he wants to be buried in the Buffalo Hollow Cemetery.”

“So do I.”

“His dad is buried there. Oh God, Mac. I wish Bill were here with me.” She takes more Kleenex and buries her face in them. Mac gets to his feet, not at all sure how he should respond, and then the dog starts tugging at his pant leg.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Esther says. “Now aren’t we just a pair of hostesses!” She reaches down to gather up and cradle Bridget in her arms. “Don’t mind us, Mac. Two eccentric females who’ve been alone together too long.”