The Englishman's Boy (47 page)

I never did write to Rachel Gold. A couple of months after I’d settled back in Saskatoon, I landed a job managing a movie theatre. I’ve been there almost thirty years. Funny, isn’t it? Harry Vincent still in the picture business. In 1925 I put a down payment on a little house overlooking the river which runs through the city. My mother lived with me in this house for ten years, until she died in February of 1935.

I never married. It isn’t that I’ve been carrying a torch all these years. I remember being a rookie at the studio, Rachel laughing and showing me a picture of herself in an old central-casting book. It was from the days when she was a bit actress, before she became a scriptwriter. The photograph was of a very young woman, but it was still Rachel. She had a knowing look in her eye.

Later, I pinched the book, took it home, and cut her picture out of it. I discovered it in my wallet a couple of years after I moved back to Saskatoon. Pictures on cheap paper don’t wear well. I could hardly make out her face. During one of my walks by the river I dropped it into the water. I have no more idea where Rachel Gold ended up than I do where that photograph did. Both moved out of view.

I accept that. Living beside the river has taught me something about change. Paved white with snow and ice in winter, slack and brown in summer, the river is never the same. As a boy, I had rushed down to it only in its moments of crisis, when it ripped apart and roared, shattered while I stood on the bank, shaking with excitement. The apocalypse has its attractions.

Chance was greedy for the apocalypse. More, he wanted to have a hand in creating it. For thirty years I’ve stood at the back of my theatre watching men like him in the newsreels. Hitler ranting like some demented Charlie Chaplin; Mussolini posturing on a balcony like some vain, second-rate Latin screen star. Now Senator Joe McCarthy bullies his way through his hearings, the gods and goddesses of Hollywood facing a different kind of public judgement than the box office, frightened, cringing before the cameras they love so dearly.

I can offer no judgement of Chance’s picture
Besieged
because I never saw it. Not many people did. It got pushed into oblivion; Chance’s murder became bigger than the picture itself. As so often happens in Hollywood, scandal became the story, obscuring everything else. The man who wanted to be another D.W. Griffith, a visionary filmmaker, is remembered today only as the man who got killed at a premiere. A small footnote.

Shorty’s story fared no better in the history books I consulted when I got back home to Canada. Searching them, I found a sentence here, a paragraph there. What I learned was little enough. For a brief time the Cypress Hills Massacre had its day in the sun; members of Parliament rose in the House, hotly denouncing the wolfers as American cutthroats, thieves, and renegades. Nobody seemed to mention that among them were Canadian cutthroats too.

Those few paragraphs always pointed to one result of the massacre. The Canadian government formed the North West Mounted Police, sent it on a long, red-jacketed march into a vast territory, establishing claim to it. A mythic act of possession.

Chance believed character didn’t count for much in history. But, looking at the river, I remind myself the map of the river is not the river itself. That hidden in it are deep, mysterious, submerged, and unpredictable currents. The characters of all those wolfers, Canadian and American, cast longer shadows than I had any inkling of that endless night in which McAdoo made his confession, crouched on a cot in a desolate bunkhouse, an old man reliving his pain and guilt thousands of miles from an obscure dot on the Saskatchewan prairie.

Each night I stand at the back of my theatre, watch spectres and phantoms slide across the screen. The picture done, the audience gone, I lock the doors, go out into the night.

But the past cannot be so easily dismissed. The faces of Rachel, Chance, and Fitz, of Wylie and of Shorty McAdoo, accompany me on my long walk home in the dark. I cross the black iron bridge, my limp a little worse each year, the water rushing underneath me in the darkness, pulling for the horizon.

32
 

P
ushing hard, Fine Man and Broken Horn had driven the stolen horses a two-day ride to the northwest of the Cypress Hills, making for where their band waited, the band of Chief Talking Bird. Last night they had made camp in the trees near the river, hiding the horses from sight so they might approach their people with the sun on their faces, the horses they brought revealed in the best light of all, morning light.

As dawn broke, they removed their travel-stained clothes, the moccasins worn thin by the long walk south, the shirts they had slept in for nine nights, the leggings cut to ribbons in scrambles over sharp rocks, the blanket breechcloths snagged and torn by wild rosebushes. Naked, they waded into the shallows of the river and washed in the cold water, scrubbing themselves with handfuls of sand while the mist rose like pipe-smoke all around them and the fish leapt for a taste of the sun.

When they had cleansed themselves, they took up hand mirrors and paint. Fine Man divided his face with the strong colours of blood and the burned-out fire, his upper lip and everything above it red, his lower lip and everything below it black. While Broken Horn was daubing yellow stripes on his forearms to record his horse raids, Fine Man stared in the glass and pondered the blue horse which had led the rest of the ponies to give themselves up to the Assiniboine. As he did, the spots where the quicksilver backing of the glass had flaked
away began to swirl in his eyes like falling snow. A sign. Quickly, he mixed a pot of white paint, held it to the nose of the roan horse, letting him smell it as he softly explained what he meant to do – dab his blue coat with white spots to make a picture of the night blizzard which four days ago had frozen the wolfers to the ground in sleep, hiding Fine Man and Broken Horn behind a spirit screen of whirling, blowing snow.

As his forefinger gently swept down the neck of the horse, dotting it with white, Fine Man decided he must not ride the blue horse into camp. Better for the horse to move in freedom, as he pleased, like a winter storm.

As he carefully placed each flake of snow on the chest, the ribs, the back of the winter horse, Fine Man’s mind was filling with the memory of how he had gone humbly to Strong Bull, the holy man, to ask him to beseech the One Above on Fine Man’s behalf when he sought the horses of his power-dream. To have such a man pray for you, to have him ride his horse among the lodges shouting out your name so the people would not forget you were alone and far away, was a good thing.

It was not so very long ago that Strong Bull was the one the young men went to with the pipe, asking him to lead them on their raids. In his dreams, Strong Bull could see where horses would be found, see how enemies would be overcome. All the country between the Missouri and the Saskatchewan was contained in his mind, every bend in the rivers, every poplar bluff, every buffalo wallow. Four times he had received wounds from the Blackfoot that would have killed any other man. But so great was his medicine that when he painted the sun’s healing rays around his bleeding flesh, four times the One Above had taken pity on him, closed the bloody mouths of his wounds, restored him to health.

Yet a time came when Strong Bull refused to carry the pipe. Many, like Broken Horn, said that Strong Bull’s heart had withered inside him, afraid that if its blood was let loose to flow one more time, it would die. The strong medicine which had brought the Assiniboine scalps and horses was gone and no one knew why. Neither did they
know why Strong Bull now played with the white man’s drawing sticks and paper like a child. He was a man after all, a man who owned a better gun than any of them, the Many Shoots Gun, the gun the white men called the Henry.

But he bought no bullets for it. It was true bullets were costly, one buffalo robe for three cartridges, but that did not explain why Strong Bull traded his prime robes for drawing sticks and the books the white men made the marks in, the lying marks which told falsehoods about how much you owed the trader.

Where once three buffalo runners had stood tethered before the entrance of Strong Bull’s lodge, now there was only one thin horse to drag his teepee poles and coverings when camp moved. Now he walked beside the travois and the sight of a proud man eating dust was like sickness to the young men.

Still, Fine Man could not believe that strong medicine could ever be wholly taken from a man as holy as Strong Bull; that is why he had gone to him to request his prayers. And when Strong Bull had promised his help, Fine Man had asked him another thing too, asked him why it was he spent his days drawing pictures in the lying books.

For as long as it took to smoke the calumet Fine Man had filled for him from his own tobacco pouch, Strong Bull made no answer. Then he laid aside the pipe, drew his blanket about his shoulders, and spoke in a solemn voice. Two years ago his power-dreams had stopped, making him lonely and afraid. Many times he prayed, begging the One Above to send dreams as before, but the dreams remained lost and wandering in the Mystery World.

He decided then to make a great trial of his spirit. He built a raft, anchored it in the midst of a lake, laid himself naked on it. For two days he suffered without shade, food, or water. He lay there with the sun scorching him, his empty belly howling for food, his tongue and lips thirsting for a taste of water, knowing all he needed to do was reach out, cup his hand, and drink. But he did not. Instead, he called to the One Above, his mouth moving like blowing dust, his eyelids glowing red as hot iron from the heat of the sun. And when night fell, he shook like a reed in the cold wind blowing off the lake.

On the second night of this ordeal, a terrible thunderstorm began to gather, the clouds rolling like black boulders down a hill, boulders which struck sparks of lightning all around him. At first the Thunderbird shot only splinters of lightning at the raft, but the darkness of Strong Bull’s mind was so deep that these were not enough. So the Thunderbird struck his chest with a blue-yellow bolt, splitting him, opening him wide with a fierce burning. From this wound nothing flowed out but much flowed in. All his other power-dreams were as nothing compared to it.

Strong Bull stopped then and a long, worshipful silence followed. At last, Fine Man found the courage to ask what it was he had seen.

Strong Bull shook his head. What was given to him, he said, was the knowledge of things to come, a knowledge which had filled him with sadness. Perhaps it would be better not to speak of it. “I will only say this,” he told Fine Man. “Everything changes. There was a time the Assiniboine had no guns, no steel hatchets or knives, no glass beads to decorate our clothes.” He paused. “There was even a time there were no horses. My grandfather told me that when his grandfather’s father first saw horses the people did not know what name to give them. Some called them big dogs, some hornless elk. The new beings puzzled the people. But when the Assiniboine studied their natures, we learned they were neither dogs nor elk; we understood that the One Above had given us horses to hunt the buffalo and to carry us wherever we wished to go.”

“Yes,” agreed Fine Man.

“Everything changes in this world,” Strong Bull repeated, “but in the Mystery World all things live as they were before death. In the Mystery World all things wait for us – our grandparents, our dead brothers of the Soldier’s Society, our infants who died at birth. And the horses, the deer, the elk, the birds of the air, the buffalo wait for us, too. Someday you will go to the Mystery World and see these things for yourself.”

Fine Man nodded this was true.

Strong Bull smiled to himself. “Sometimes I think of our people long ago, how strange it must have been for them to see horses for
the first time. Were they frightened of them? Did they suppose horses ate meat like dogs? Everything changes. Perhaps these beings will pass out of this world the way they came into it. Maybe some day there will be no more horses. Or elk. Or buffalo. You and I have seen these beings, but what if our grandchildren have no knowledge of them? I do not want the grandchildren to be frightened when they pass into the Mystery World and encounter beings which may be strange to them. Of course, the black robes who wear the man on the sticks say the spirits of animals cannot enter the Mystery World, but that is foolish.”

“Yes,” said Fine Man, “very foolish.”

“And I have thought something else,” said Strong Bull. “If the grandchildren do not recognize these beings, perhaps they will not recognize us either.” He reached behind him and lifted up a bundle wrapped in the hide of an unborn buffalo calf, undid the bindings, took out a trader book, passed it to Fine Man. “That is why I draw the pictures – so the grandchildren will recognize us,” he said.

Fine Man began to carefully turn the pages of the book. Here was a picture of the women dancing, he knew each one by her dress. Here men were skinning buffalo in the snow. Here was a feast in which Left Hand could be seen passing his plate of meat to Broken Horn with a token stick. This signified Left Hand was bursting with food, and if Broken Horn would eat his portion so as not to insult the host, Left Hand would repay his kindness by giving him a horse. Last of all, he found a picture of himself, Fine Man in his best black leather shirt embroidered with green and white seed beads.