Bone Dance

Also by Martha Brooks

True Confessions of a Heartless Girl
Being with Henry
Two Moons in August
Traveling On into the Light and Other Stories

Martha Brooks

Copyright © 1997 by Martha Brooks
Fourth mass market printing 2005

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, ON M5V 2K4

Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West
1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Ontario Arts Council.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Brooks, Martha
Bone dance
A Groundwood book.
ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-336-6
ISBN-10: 0-88899-336-6
I. Title.
PS8553.R66B66    1998    jC813'.54   C97-931491-7
PZ7.B66Bo    1998

Cover photograph by Jim Brandenberg / Minden Pictures
Book design by Mina Greenstein
Printed and bound in Canada

For my daughter,
Kirsten Jay Brooks, Blue Wolf

And the memory of her beloved grandfather,
Alfred Leroy Paine

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the children of the Earth.”

—C
HIEF
S
EATTLE
,
from his address to the president of the
United States, 1855

“In the purity of the morning, I see how much more there is to the world than meets the eye.…”

—S
HARON
B
UTALA
from
The Perfection of the Morning:
An Apprenticeship in Nature

In the middle of the night, in the middle of her eleventh-grade year, in the middle of the coldest Manitoba winter for a century, Grandpa called to say that he was worried about “the dark.”

“It's night, Grandpa. It's night and time to go to bed.”

“It just rolls in, Alex,” he continued, “and all I can do is watch. It's terrible. I can't sleep.”

She knew that the cancer wouldn't let him sleep. Plus, lately he seemed confused. A nurse was with him during the day. Then Alex and Mom and Auntie Francine took turns being with him during the evening. At midnight, when they were back in their own beds, it was hard to turn off thoughts, to sleep, peacefully to dream.

“I'll come over. Okay?” Tears tumbled down her cheeks onto her red turtleneck sweater, which she hadn't bothered to change out of before falling into bed. “I'll be right there, Grandpa.”

“No,” he said, clearing his throat, reclaiming his
dignity. “No, Alexandra Marie Sinclair. You need to rest. I shouldn't have called. I just wanted to hear your voice one more time today. How's school?”

She didn't want him to die. But how could she wish for her grandpa to stay with all that he had suffered?

“Grandpa,” she said, “I love you. Please try to go to sleep. You need to rest, too.”

“Well, I've worried you. This isn't like me,” he said forlornly, reading her mind as usual. “I'm not myself lately.”

She got off the phone and rolled back into bed but couldn't sleep. She kept seeing him up in his apartment, slack-jawed, watching in terror as the dark pressed against his fourteenth-floor living-room window. She thought about the mysteries of the universe and about how, soon, they would all unfold for him. And about how she'd be left behind. And about how this was becoming a pattern in her life.

When her mother was nineteen years old, she came home late one night, marched into the kitchen, and announced to Grandpa and Grandma, who was then still alive, “I'm going to marry Earl McKay. And there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.”

Well, they didn't stop her. And it became an infamous family story. “She was the most unstoppable young woman,” Grandpa said. “Stubborn. Full of pride. Of course we worried that it would end up bad. And we were right. Earl McKay didn't choose to stick around after you were born. But it did mean that I got to spend more time with you. So there you go!

Life is full of surprises, and sometimes the good ones and the bad ones get all bunched up together.”

According to Auntie Francine, Alex was badly spoiled by them all. “If you asked for the moon,” said Francine, “Grandpa Paul would hang it shining around your neck in a minute. But we've all spoiled you. We're to blame for lavishing all this love on you so that you've come to expect it, like royalty.”

“Don't be ridiculous, Auntie.”

“It's true,” said Francine, grabbing her close, kissing her hair. “You've always been marked for something special. Just don't let it go to your head.”

Three nights after Grandpa called about the dark, Alex was out with Serena Fitzpatrick and Andrea Larkin and Jeremy Huntinghawk in the snowy park down the street. It was the only place nearby where she could find the solace of the country in the middle of the city. On this prairie winter night, deep in the sleeping heart of January, it was twenty-six below zero. The only light was the moon, dazzling down on the snow.

They played tag all through the cathedral of frozen trees. And then Jeremy said, “Okay, now, on the count of three, everybody howl.”

They threw back their heads and counted, and then they howled. Like feral creatures. Like heartsick lonely wolves. And it felt so good as they ran through the snow crying, “A-wooo!” at the flying moon. “A-wah-wah-woooo!”

She stopped to watch the others howling and
leaping. And it was at this moment that she knew her grandfather had just moved, without saying good-bye, far beyond her reach. With absolute certainty, her heart thudding against her chest, she knew that he had slipped past her, past them all, past the dark of winter and midnight and consciousness and eating and sleeping and caring. Then she watched as her own breath rose in front of her astonished eyes, took form, and floated like a spirit hand on the crystal air.

The end of a hot dusty day in early August. Lonny pulled the truck off the road. The wheels bumped down the rutted grassy trail. Leaf-rattling poplar trees crowded in, then chokecherry bushes, scraping past the windows, thrumming the silver aerial.

The trail ended in the wide clearing that overlooked Fatback Lake. They lurched to a halt. Earl McKay slowly got down from the passenger's side, blinking his eyes like a newborn baby.

Lonny got out, too, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans, showing this worn-out cowboy that he was more casual than he felt. Showing him this property that had been in his stepfather's family since the first LaFrenière, a Métis trapper and buffalo hunter, took up land along the lake and up into the Lacs des Placottes Valley hills.

The ancestral LaFrenière log cabin, once snug and sturdy, was as gray and sagging as an abandoned wasp's nest. Behind that were the cut banks, the hills, and that particular one with its Indian burial mound
that everyone for miles around called Medicine Bluff. As always, the mound was rosy and beautiful in the fading light of day. As always, he could feel the presence of the furious spirits rising around it.

“I'll haul in that old house trailer your stepdad offered me,” said Earl. “Then I'll build my own little place where I can sit high and dry and watch the lake break up next spring, yessir.” He lined his finger up to the woodlands—the white birches, the scrub oaks, the poplars, the rocks where mosses grew, the sloping banks—and slowly turned three hundred and sixty degrees until he faced the lake again.

“I've got to admit,” he continued with a satisfied sigh, “this place is as close to heaven as I'm ever going to find. I'm half a century old and tired of moving around.”

He looked sharply at Lonny. “What made your stepdad change his mind and decide to sell?”

Lonny kicked at the tires. “It's not good for anything,” he mumbled.

“Now I know you're being modest. You were raised right close. Isn't that true?”

“Since I was seven,” Lonny said, and then wished he hadn't.

“Seven?
Why, that's most of your lifetime, boy. Isn't that so? Don't
you
want to keep it?”

None of your damn business, he thought, his jaw muscles tightening.

Earl persisted. “Figured the way your stepdad feels about you, that'd be the last thing he'd want to sell. Land that's been in the family for generations.”

In the neighboring farms, everyone knew enough to avoid talking about the selling of this particular parcel of land. There was Jacob Wiebe, for instance. Out of respect and affection for Pop, he talked around it, standing beside his truck, saying things like, “Well, Tom, one thing's for sure, time don't stand still.” Avoiding Pop's eyes. Squinting instead at the sun. “If you need anything, don't you hesitate to ask.”

But Earl McKay didn't seem to have any sense of what Pop called good old-fashioned country propriety.

“I don't want to rush you,” said Lonny, “but I have to get back pretty soon.”

He couldn't wait to get back into the truck and take the hell off. Away from the whisperings of the Ancients. Away to the safety of the prairie farm road.

Earl McKay was in no hurry. He sniffed the air as if he were a man just let out of prison. As if he truly didn't understand that some places had the power to do anything they wanted to you. Well, let him find out for himself. There was nothing in the world that was going to stop him now. He'd been back twice already, making the trip on the bus from Lethbridge across two provinces with one eye, probably, on the horizon, just counting the minutes until he owned the LaFrenière homestead.

Back at home Pop had served them all the last of the venison soup from the deer he'd shot early this spring and cut up and put in their freezer.

It had only been half-grown. “We have to eat, son,” was all the explanation Pop had given Lonny the day
he'd come dragging it home through the bush. Lonny had just gotten off the school bus. He'd stood in the yard with a
History of the Modern World
textbook and two ridiculously bright purple binders tucked under his arm. He pushed his glasses back up his nose and stared hard at the deer. Its head wobbled back in the snow. A thin string of blood and mucus came from its nose.