The Cardinal Divide (37 page)

The two boys circle each other. Cole throws another left-right combination that grazes his brother's gloves and shoulder. Neither boy is smiling now.

“You never listen do you, Cole?” His father shouts. “Always want to do it your way. Well, your way is going to get you knocked on your ass. It's going to get you punched in the nose, is what's going to happen!”

The boys trade jabs but neither seem to be into the boxing match anymore. Their father wheels around the ring, his hands waving above him.

“If it's not one thing it's another with you, boy. You bitch about how I try to teach you to box. If it's not that, you're bitching about how I run the ranch. Bitch about how I take care of them wolves that are killin' our cattle. Bitch at me about using pesticides on the place, like you want to grow a crop of Goddamn weeds rather than putting aside some hay!”

The old man gripes the upper rope with both hands, sways a little, spitting as he yells. He shakes his head and seems to realize that he is in the barn beside the boxing ring. He stops shouting. The air is still. The dog had stopped barking. The two boys do not look at Henry Blackwater, but at each other, at their feet, at the mat. Anything to avoid his furious eyes.

“Well, what the hell are you standing there for?”

“Take it easy, Pop,” says Walter quietly.

“Don't tell me what do to, Walter. You shut up and box now.”

The two boys raise their hands again and begin to dance side to side, throwing a few exploratory punches. Walter lands an easy right jab that Cole stumbles back from. Cole then steps in
to throw the left-right combination they have been working on all night, but Walter steps aside and Cole trips over his brother's feet and hits the mat. Walter stoops to help Cole to his feet. Both boys are dog-tired after a long day of work and a long workout at night.

“Goddamn it, Cole!” shouts Blackwater. Both boys stop. “How many times I got to tell you? You can't just poke at him with that left if you're goin' to set him up for a knockout punch. You got to hit him hard and get him leanin' into that right!” The man is sweating and his face is flushed. He steps back from the ropes and demonstrates, his hands up in front of his face, his back bent and his body bobbing in the typical boxer's stance.

“You got to watch for your man to step a little off balance and then pop, pop!” He throws two quick left jabs. His flesh and the leather in the gloves pop in the air. “And then pow!” He swings out with his right. “That's how you do it.” Henry straightens. The boys puff hard, beads of sweat dripping from their noses. They stand close to each other, their bodies slick and coated with the dust from the hay.

“Now you put those Goddamn gloves up, Cole, and show me how you can do it.” Henry swings under the rope and pushes Walter none-too-gently aside and takes up a stance in front of Cole.

Cole looks at Walter. Walter looks down at his younger brother. Cole steps forward.

“Come on now, put em' up!” The father shouts. He starts to scuffle sideways, his feet heavy.

Cole looks again at Walter. He steps forward and begins to circle before his hulking father. They trade a few punches.

“Now watch for it,” the father says, circling, his feet dragging.

The boy's eyes are fixed on his father's.

“Watch for it.”

They circle. They trade a few exploratory punches. Henry Blackwater stumbles a little. “Watch – ” As the father lilts sideways, Cole strikes quickly with two left jabs, landing them on his father's chin, cutting the man's sentence off, and knocking him back a little. Henry Blackwater's eyes open with surprise.

Then Cole steps forward with his right foot and lands a right hook squarely on the father's cheek, knocking him backward against the ropes.

Cole brightens and lowers his hands a little. Walter grins behind him. Cole begins to speak, relaxing. “I got it!” he says as his father's right glove lands squarely in the middle of his face, knocking him off his feet, sending him crumpling to the mat. A trail of blood follows him down, streaming from his nose. The sound of his body colliding with the canvas is quickly absorbed by the hay-lined walls.

The dog explodes in a frenzy of barking and runs out of the barn into the night.

Walter quickly drops to his knees beside his prone brother.

Henry Blackwater remains standing, swaying, hands up and at the ready.

“Cole, are you
OK
?” The boy's nose is crooked and bleeding, but his eyes are open, conscious of the swirling world around him. He says nothing.

Walter looked up at his father. “His nose is broken.”

“He's got to learn,” says his father distantly. “Got to learn. You can't let your guard down. Not once. Not ever.”

Walter cradles his brother's head in his arm. Cole focuses on his brother's reassuring presence.

“Can't let your guard down just cause you land a punch. Got to learn! I never let them get in. Not once. Just cause you land a punch, you got to watch for what's coming at you next. Never let your guard down!”

Cole Blackwater lay on the canvas mat, bleeding, his head spinning, his brother holding a towel to his face while soothing Cole with his voice: “We'll get some ice. I'll get Mom. It will be
OK
, Cole. Just lie here and don't say a word. Don't say a word.”

That had been nearly twenty-five years ago. Cole blinked the hay dust from his eyes and managed to roll over onto his back. He rose to his feet and found his way, swaying, to the tack room where he retrieved a couple of saddle blankets that smelled sweetly of horses.

It was three years since he had been in his parents' barn.

Fleeing disgrace and shame in Ottawa, on his way to much of the same in Vancouver, Cole took a detour. He stopped in Calgary on the long drive across Canada and turned left to make the
two-hour drive south along Highway 22, a lovely little road that wound through the foothills. Then he turned east and travelled over the crest of the Porcupine Hills and down into their lee to the family homestead.

He was there for a week before the old man showed his face at a meal. Cole didn't care. Being on the ranch was a nasty piece of time travel. All of a sudden he was fourteen years old, boxing every day and getting the living hell beaten out of him. He would have left after the first two days but he saw his mother only once every two or three years.

So he stayed, helped around the house, seeded a field, and repaired a manure spreader his father had let fall into disuse. Cole was aware of his father's presence in the yard. He could hear his father in the barn where the cows slept in the winter. Late at night the old man listened to a tinny radio in the basement workshop. Cole could see his father's shadow moving between the weathered boards. Could hear his cursing, and then the long silences.

Cole avoided the old man and steered clear of the barn except when he wanted to ride. Then he would stand outside the barn doors for five minutes to work up the courage to step into that hated place to look for saddle, blankets, halter, and bridle, and choose a horse that needed running.

At the end of the second week, Cole was out riding an old mare named Blue when his father suddenly rode up beside him. Henry Blackwater looked every bit the cowboy. He wore a tight, checkered, pearl-button shirt with a felt-lined tan vest over it, the zipper done up nearly to the top. He had a pair of dark blue Wranglers on and wore a sweat-stained Stetson on his head at a peculiar angle. Cole suspected that he had already been drinking some of his home brew, sour mash, by the way he held the reins so lightly. If he fell off his horse and hit his head on the rocks below, that was fine with Cole. The world would not miss Henry Blackwater.

“Your mother's pretty glad you're here,” said the old man.

“It's good to see her,” said Cole, eyes staring straight ahead at the horizon of blue peaks above the bristled Porcupine Hills.

“Got yourself in a bit of trouble back in Ottawa, did you?”

Cole was silent. Had his father been waiting for Cole to let his guard down before striking?

His father spat. “Got yourself in a little too deep, didn't you, boy?”

Cole shifted his weight and the saddle creaked.

“You don't have to answer me, Cole. We both know that you fucked up good this time, if you take my meaning.” The old man laughed harshly. “I should have made sure that you knew right from wrong better. Should have taught you your lessons better. Should have made sure you knew how to take care of your family right.”

Cole realized he was holding his breath and let it out with a low whistle.

“Ain't you going to say anything?”

“Not to you,” said Cole, and he turned his horse around.

The old man trotted to catch up. “What the fuck were you thinking, Cole? Fucking around on your wife. Making a mess of your job? Bringing shame on your daughter? What the fuck were you thinking?”

Cole pressed his heels into Blue and she stepped up her gait.

“You can't outride me, city boy. I live in the saddle. You're just a fucking tourist here.”

Cole looked over at the old man. He grinned at Cole.

“What made you such a hateful bastard, I wonder?” Cole finally asked.

“Having to put up with good-for-nothing pricks like you all my life,” his father growled.

“If we're lucky,” said Cole ruefully, “we won't have to put up with
you
for too much longer.”

“I'm going to outlive you all,” his father said, spat again, and turned his horse away from Cole.

That was the last time Cole spoke with his father. By the end of the day the old man was dead.

Cole stayed on to help with the funeral, got drunk with his brother Walter, and then drove to Vancouver to start the next chapter of his life. He hoped he would be able to get on with things with the old man finally gone, make a clean break with the violence of his past. Indeed, Cole became good at forgetting. He routinely went days without a thought about that final night in the barn under the glare of the lights, and the sudden end there on the mat. On those days Cole was just like everybody else walking down the streets of Vancouver.

But the final act of violence in Henry and Cole Blackwater's explosive relationship flooded back as he lay wrapped in blankets on the floor of the barn. The barn was where it always happened. Under the swinging lights, on the mat, or if he refused to step in as he sometimes did, against the bales of hay, or on the blood-soaked floor. The barn was where it always happened, and the barn was where it came to a bloody end.

Cole rolled in his blankets, pushing the evil memory back into the darkness where it had secreted itself for the last three years. His thrashing upending a table full of tools that crashed to the floor around him. He shouldn't have come back to Alberta. Should have left the past behind him. Shouldn't have dug so deeply. But like the miners he was trying to stop from destroying Cardinal Divide, Cole Blackwater pushed on, regardless of the consequences. He had stopped asking why or why not. He was digging steadily toward where he had buried the awful truth in his own past.

She had loved him and he destroyed her. That was what Cole Blackwater did to the things that dared love him. That was what had been done to him, and in turn he passed that rare gift of destruction on to those who loved him.

His brain swam. He pulled himself to sitting and leaned against one of the barn's pillars.

The rich smell of horses churned his memories. His father was a broken and angry man who, if there had been any justice in the world, would have been killed on the shores of France. But then Cole and Walter, and Cole's progeny, Sarah, would never have been. Henry Blackwater deserved his fate, thought Cole, but Sarah deserved a richer inheritance.

Sarah deserved far better.

He awoke to the smell of coffee.

Gord McSorlie stood over him, steaming cup in hand.

“Thought this might come in handy this morning.”

Cole opened his eyes. He lay curled in the fetal position on the floor of the barn. He was cold, and his body ached terribly.

“I've never slept in this barn,” said Gord, looking around him as if considering the possibility. “How was it?”

Cole groaned and pushed himself upright to lean on the pillar again. He accepted the cup of coffee and held it to warm his hands.

“That good, eh? Well, when you're ready, there's a hot shower and Peggy has breakfast ready for you too. I'm told you have a big day ahead of you. Better get cracking.”

Cole looked up and offered a weak smile in thanks.

“You ran over one of Peggy's rock gardens last night, by the way.”

Cole moaned under his breath. “Sorry,” he said balefully.

“It will be fine. Better check the undercarriage of that truck of yours, though.”

Half an hour later he sat at the McSorlie's long kitchen table drinking a third cup of coffee. He had showered and changed and felt surprisingly presentable.

“What happened to your chin?” asked Peggy as she served him breakfast.

He told her about Hank Henderson.

“You sure have a way with people, don't you? Have you ever met someone you didn't get in a fight with?” She chided him as she pushed a few more sausages onto his plate.

“You,” he said. They shared a laugh and then he told her about the blood in the bathroom.

She sat down as he described what he thought had transpired in that fourth floor lavatory. Then he recounted his tour of the mine, and what Nancy had learned about the investigation's impasse on the murder weapon.

“You have to go to the
RCMP
with this new information,” Peggy encouraged him.

“I know. Nancy said the same thing. I just thought that she wanted to scoop, so I was a bit of a crank with her.”

“Scoop or not, it's important. I think they should know.”