It’s really dark out and I’m sorry we didn’t bring Soldier because I’d have someone to talk to. I can hear the chickens behind the wire, and I think about shaking the coop just to see what they will do.
The chicken coop is a wooden lean-to with a larger open area that is penned off with wire. My grandmother told me she never knows exactly how many chickens she has because it always changes around suppertime. I counted them once and there were thirty-seven. According to my grandmother, there are only three kinds of chickens in the world: layers, fancies, and meat birds. “The layers aren’t worth smoke,” she’d say. “And the fancies are four feet short of a yard.”
At the side of the coop there is a long hook that my grandmother uses for catching the birds. I’m always amazed at the ease with which she snakes the hook around the pen, catching a chicken and dragging
it flapping through the dirt. Or the quickness with which she can snatch it up by its feet and break its neck.
I walk to the side of the coop, push my lips through the wire, and make soft coyote noises. Nothing. I growl a little. Nothing. I bark and rattle the wire and some of the chickens come alive, but they’re too stupid to be much fun. So, I go back to the house and stand next to the window. My mother and auntie Cassie and my grandmother haven’t moved from their chairs. I lean against the window frame so my ear is right at the opening just as round three begins.
“What about him?” auntie Cassie says. “Why is it always just me?”
My mother is trying to talk at the same time, but I can’t hear what she is saying. Monroe’s name gets mentioned once, and my grandmother says a few not-so-nice things about my father, but mostly there are long breaks when no one talks, and I wonder if my grandmother knows that I’m listening and is aiming her voice low so only her daughters can hear her.
My mother raises her voice to say that “not everyone gets what they want,” but who the everyone is and what it is they don’t get is not mentioned. I stay by the window and throw rocks at the eggplants in the garden, and then I throw a few at the trailer. When I hear the front door of the house open, I get up and head for the coop. I hang on the wire, my back to the house, as if I’ve been watching the chickens sleep the whole time.
I glance over my shoulder just in time to see my mother come into the garden. In the moonlight, she looks pale and thin, and she’s limping as if she’s been injured or has a cramp from sitting too long. And it is only when she turns and walks towards the trailer that I realize I’ve made a mistake.
“Don’t blame me.” Auntie Cassie smiles and opens the trailer door. “Everyone was alive when I left.”
I played cards with the Swedish woman and auntie Cassie, but nobody took off any more clothes. Around one o’clock, auntie Cassie sent me back to the house, which was okay with me because I was tired. I was halfway through the garden when the lights in the trailer went out and I was stuck in the dark. It took me a while to
work my way back to the house, and even after I was in bed and almost asleep, I could hear auntie Cassie and the Swedish woman in the trailer whispering to each other and laughing.
Early the next morning, auntie Cassie and the Swedish woman drove down to Prairie View to get some food. I wanted to go with them but they said no, that they had some looking around to do and weren’t sure when they would be back. Which was just as well, I suppose, because they never came back.
I asked my grandmother what had happened, but she didn’t say much. She sat at the table, wrapped up in her sweater, and practised growling into her coffee, sending shock waves all the way to the bottom of the cup.
I go into the house. My mother and my grandmother are sitting in the same chairs. “The chickens are fine,” I say, before my mother can tell me to go back outside.
“It’s okay,” she says. “We should be heading home.”
Most of the cookies are still on the plate. I take a couple while I stand there. “Where’s auntie Cassie?” I ask, even though I already know.
“I’ll be out for Indian Days,” my mother tells my grandmother, and she puts her sweater on and goes to the door.
My grandmother’s eyes are closed. “The box on the counter is yours,” she says to me without moving. “And next time, don’t tease the chickens.”
When my mother and auntie Cassie were kids, the principal of the elementary school on the reserve, a young white man named Arthur Circle who had come from Ontario the year before, showed up at my grandmother’s door to talk to her about her daughters. There were some problems, Mr. Circle told my grandmother, problems that he was sure she would want to know about. Then he took out a folder and began reading teachers’ reports that complained about everything from inattentiveness to disruptive behaviour.
My grandmother listened to Mr. Circle for a while, and then she snuggled down in her sweater and began coughing. At first, they
were just low chuffing coughs aimed at the floor, but as Mr. Circle turned each page in the folder, the coughs gathered force and took on weight and shape and began to fill the room.
My mother said you could see that Mr. Circle was getting nervous. His face was covered with sweat. He pulled his feet in under the chair and began looking around the room and losing his place. Then suddenly, in mid-sentence, he stood up, excused himself, and was out the door without even saying goodbye.
My mother and auntie Cassie watched him from the window as he walked and then ran to the band office, turning back every few steps, looking over his shoulder to see what was coming up behind him.
The box on the counter is full of vegetables and chickens. It’s heavy and I have to carry it by myself. My mother walks all the way to the ridge before she stops and waits for me.
“What happened to auntie Cassie?”
“Nothing,” says my mother. “Nothing ever happens to Cassie.”
The fog has filled the river valley. I take a few steps forward until it is right at my feet. In the moonlight, the fog glows like steel, and it looks as if you could step out and walk across it all the way back to Truth.
“Look at that,” I say. “You can see the Frontier from here.”
My mother puts her arm around me. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?”
“Looks great from here.”
“It always did,” says my mother, and she turns and begins walking down the trail to the ferry, leaving me standing on the ridge alone.
M
y mother’s quilt is not the easy kind of quilt you can get at the Mennonite colony near Blossom or one of the fancy machine-stitched quilts you could get in Prairie View at the Woodward’s store before it went out of business, and that is probably why it’s taken my mother so long to finish and why she is still working on it. Along with the squares and triangles and circles of cloth that have been sewn together, patterns with names like Harvest Star, and Sunshine and Shadow, and Sunburst, my mother has also fastened unexpected things to the quilt, such as the heavy metal washers that run along the outside edges and the clusters of needles that she has worked into the stitching just below the fish hooks and the chickens’ feathers.
My father told me that my mother started the quilt just after I was born and that it had started off simple enough, but that even before he left us and went to Truth, the quilt had begun to be a problem.
“In the beginning,” he told me, “everything was pretty much squares and triangles.”
“What happened?”
“Who knows.”
The geometric forms slowly softened and turned into freehand patterns that looked a lot like trees and mountains and people and animals, and before long, my father said you could see Truth in one corner of the quilt and Bright Water in the other with the Shield flowing through the fabrics in tiny diamonds and fancy stitching.
“It’s one of those obsession things that women get,” my father said. “Like wanting to be beautiful or wanting to have kids.”
After a while, my father told me, my mother began coming up with a bunch of weird things to sew into the quilt. “Chicken feet,” my father said. “And hair.”
“The porcupine quills look nice.”
“I bought her a really nice pair of earrings once, and they wound up on the quilt.”
I wanted to know the story behind the needles and the fish hooks, but my father said that those came later, that I would have to ask my mother about them. My father figured that the quilt was a way my mother had of dealing with frustration and disappointment. “Finding all that weird stuff and wasting time sewing it on probably helps calm her down,” he said.
“She’s stuck a lot of new things on since you left.”
“Did she ever take the razor blades off?”
“Nope, they’re still there.”
“Not sure I’d sleep too well knowing that,” said my father. “What about you?”
“All the dangerous stuff is on top.”
You could see people on the quilt but you couldn’t tell who they were. My father decided that a tall figure with a yellow and blue face was him and that I was a piece of cloth that looked more like a purple jelly bean than a person. Towards one side, away from everything else, was a piece of rose terry cloth that reminded me of a sleeping child.
“You know the difference between a bull and a steer, don’t you?” said my father.
“Sure.”
“Then I’d stay away from that quilt.”
My father was probably right, but it looked as if you’d be safe enough as long as you were under the quilt and weren’t moving around on the outside, trying to get in. What I liked best were the needles. When you held the quilt up, they would tinkle like little bells and flash in the light like knives.
T
he next morning, when I get up, the shop is quiet, and I figure that my mother has gone over behind Santucci’s to sort through any flowers that Mrs. Santucci has thrown out. This is fine with me because it means that she’s not washing someone’s hair and wasting all the hot water. Even at the best of times, the water is never really hot, and if I don’t get to the shower first thing, all that’s left is luke-warm. Or cold.
I stand in the tub and let the water run over my head and shoulders, smooth and warm, and as the bathroom turns to steam, I lean against the wall and close my eyes and try to imagine what the woman was doing on the Horns.
My first theory is that she’s angry about something. Maybe her boyfriend or her husband has left her. Maybe she stuffs his favourite clothes into a suitcase, drives out to the river in a fury, and throws everything into the water. Maybe she’s so angry she jumps in herself. Maybe she loses her balance. In any case, the water calms her down. She swims back to shore, climbs back up to the Horns, gets in her truck, and drives away.
This theory is simple and complete. The only problem is that there are better places to throw a suitcase into the river. And closer. You could go across the tracks on Division Street South to the overlook and toss a suitcase off there. The woman might have wanted privacy, but angry people generally don’t care about things like that. When Ida Jerome caught her husband, Jerry, with Stella Watson, the whole town knew about it. The moment it happened.
But if the woman was angry, why was she dancing? I’m working on this when I hear the toilet flush and the water pressure drops to a trickle.
“Hey!”
“You in there, cousin?”
“Lum?”
“Quit playing with the soap.” Lum tosses a towel against the shower curtain. Part of it loops over the bar and hangs there.
“I just got in,” I say.
“You don’t have that much to wash.”
The water returns to normal and I put my head back under the spray in order to drown out Lum’s voice. The tub drains slowly and the water is up to my ankles now. I’m just beginning to enjoy myself again when I feel something bump up against my butt. It makes me jump, and when I turn around, I see Lum’s arm sticking through the shower curtain. In his hand is the skull.
“Have you seen a bone around here?” Lum says in that stupid tinny voice of his, and he moves the skull up and down as if it’s talking.
“You been drinking again?”
“A teeny-weeny bonie.” Lum balances the skull on the edge of the tub and then lets it slide down the porcelain. It hits the water, tumbles over, and floats up against my leg. It bobs around in the soap suds for a moment and then settles to the bottom of the tub. The skull looks funny sitting there, half-submerged, the soap slick floating in and out of the eye sockets.
“Your brother’s drowning,” I tell Lum.
“Just don’t piss on him.” Lum’s hand dives into the shower and snatches the skull out of the water like a hawk hitting a fish. “Yuck!” shouts Lum. “What’s this white shit all over him?”
“It’s soap.”
“Pervert!”
My second theory is that the woman’s boyfriend or husband has died or been killed. She packs his favourite clothes in his favourite suitcase and drives out to the Horns. When she gets there, she discovers that she can’t bear simply to throw the suitcase into the river, so she jumps in with it and, as a gesture of love, floats along with the suitcase for a ways before she sets it free in the current. She swims to shore, gets out, has a good cry on the bank, climbs back up to the Horns, gets in her car, and drives away.
That would explain why the woman didn’t throw the suitcase off the overlook. She wanted to be alone. Sorrow is different from anger. When my father left Bright Water and moved to Truth, my mother didn’t yell and throw things the way you see women do in the movies. She stayed in the house and worked on the quilt. I was pretty sure she was angry, but maybe she was sad at the same time.
When I come out of the shower, Lum is sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped up in my mother’s quilt, eating toast and drinking apple juice.
“Hey! Take it off. My mother sees you with that and I’ll catch shit.”
“I’m not going to hurt it.” Lum stands up and spins around in a tight circle so that the feathers lift away from the quilt like tiny wings and the ribbons tremble like tongues. “There any more apple juice?”
“You drank all the juice?”
“Water’s better for you anyway,” says Lum. “This stuff’s mostly sugar.”
“Thought you were in training.”
“Long-distance runners need sugar.”
There’s a pan on the stove. It’s empty, but I can still smell the sausage. “What else did you eat?”
“A traditional Indian would never ask that question.” Lum folds the quilt up and puts it back in the basket.
“My sausage, right?”
“Protein.” Lum opens the oven and takes out a plate with three sausages on it and hands it to me. “How do you expect me to win the race without protein?”
“How many did you eat?”
Lum picks up the newspaper and settles in behind it. “It says here that Indians make up the largest percentage of Canada’s prison population.”
I put four pieces of toast in the toaster and look in the refrigerator to see if there is more juice.
“That suggest anything to you?” says Lum.
“Like what?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be wasting our time looking for jobs.”
The toast pops up. I butter it, wrap it around the sausages, and squeeze the bread so that the butter pools up around the meat. “My father’s not in jail,” I say. “And neither is your father.”
“There’s a line.” Lum closes the paper and puts it on the table. “You have to wait your turn.” He leans over and comes back up with the skull. He bounces it on the table and rolls it over to me. It doesn’t roll very well. It rocks from side to side like the drunks you see outside the Silver Spur on Friday night.
“Where you want to hide it?” Lum pushes his lips at the skull on the table.
“Why do we have to hide it?”
“Evidence,” says Lum, as if that answers the question. He grabs the skull and starts towards my room. “How about your closet? We could bury it under all the junk.”
“No good,” I tell him. “Soldier’ll just dig it out.”
“How about the cupboard?”
“Mom’s always in there.”
“Under the sink?”
“Worse.”
Lum stands in the middle of the kitchen, his hands on his hips. Soldier comes in from the shop, following the aroma of sausage. He glances at the stove and then comes over and leans against Lum’s leg.
Lum reaches down and pulls at Soldier’s ear. “How about we cram it up the mutt’s ass.”
The building my mother rents was once a hardware store and warehouse. It is a long narrow affair that smells vaguely of paint thinner and oil. At the front, where my mother has her shop, the ceiling has been lowered, so when we first moved into the building, it felt as though we were moving into a cave. But my mother borrowed a ladder from my father, even though they weren’t talking to each other much, and painted the ceiling and the walls a bright yellow, so when the sun comes in through the plate-glass window and lights up the red enamel sink and the second-hand white and turquoise hair dryer, the place feels warm and cheery and seems larger than it really is.
The back area is cooler, and everything beyond the shop is dark grey. My mother was going to paint the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom off-white or sand, but she never got around to it. It’s not so bad though, and if we had a couple of windows in the back area, the only other thing we’d really need is a second bedroom so my mother wouldn’t have to sleep on the couch. But there aren’t any windows in this part of the building. And even with all the lights on and the television going, you feel as if you’re sitting at the bottom of a well.
“What’s up there?” Lum peers into the darkness.
“Nothing much,” I tell him. “Rafters.”
“Let’s take a look.”
There’s a wooden ladder built into the wall. It takes you up to the first set of rafters. I’ve forgotten how high off the floor the rafters are. Lum is right behind, nudging me along with the skull.
“Where’s that little bone?” he squeaks. “Yummy, yummy.”
“Go chew on your own bone.”
As I inch my way along, I plow up the dust with my crotch and push it over the edge of the rafter. It drifts down like snow, twin-kling into the light.
“You ever fall?” says Lum, and he pokes me in the back with his fist.
“Knock it off.”
I don’t see the first set of braces until I run into them. They’re set at angles to the main joists. At the second brace, someone has pounded a large nail halfway into the wood. “How about here?”
Lum hands me the skull. I loop the ribbon over the nail and lower the skull until it hangs just below the rafters and above the light, as if it’s floating in space. Soldier walks around in a circle looking up at us, but I’m pretty sure he can’t see anything.
“Hear your crazy aunt is back,” says Lum.
“She’s not crazy.”
“The one with the tattoo, right?” Lum blows on the back of my neck. “The one who thinks you’re a girl.”
“She doesn’t think I’m a girl.”
“She sent you a doll.”
“That was a mistake.”
“She dying or something?”
“No.”
“Nobody comes back to Truth and Bright Water,” says Lum, “unless they’re crazy or dying.”
“Monroe Swimmer came back,” I say.
“Number one,” says Lum, and he shoves me again, and this time I have to grab onto the rafter with both hands.
The third theory is more melodramatic, and suicide sounds too much like a movie for me to like it much.
But maybe someone the woman loves has left her or has died, and she’s depressed. Maybe the suitcase is full of her own clothes and all the precious things she has in the world. She finishes dinner that evening and cleans the house. Then she puts on her best dress and drives to the Horns. She waits on the cliff for the moon to rise, and just as it does, she clutches the suitcase to her chest and jumps off. Of course, she sinks immediately, and as the water’s cold, even in the summer, the shock brings her back to her senses. The suitcase is lost, but she is able to stagger to shore, wet and freezing and embarrassed, find her truck, and drive home.
It’s an okay theory, but there are better ways to kill yourself. Everybody knows that putting a hose in a car’s exhaust, or taking a lot of sleeping pills with whisky or maybe even beer, or cutting your wrists with a razor blade in a bathtub full of warm water, or jumping out the window of a tall building—and there are several tall buildings in Truth—would be quicker and more effective. So, if she went to the river to commit suicide, she wasn’t serious, and was probably just looking for attention.
When we get down, Soldier is waiting for us. His ears are up and his head is cocked to one side. I look up at the rafters to see if I can find the skull. Soldier sits back and stares into the darkness. His body quivers and he begins to drool again.
“You can’t see anything,” I tell him.
“Not to worry,” says Lum. “Dog couldn’t find a pole if you tied him to it.”
The front doorbell rings, and Soldier forgets about the skull for the moment and hurries into the shop. When Lum and I get to the front, my mother is dumping an armload of flowers into the sink.
“You find the sausage?”
“Yeah,” I say, “but Lum ate most of them.”
My mother turns and smiles at Lum, but I can see she’s looking at his eye. “How’s your father?”
“He’s fine,” says Lum.
“Everything ready for Indian Days?”
“Just about.”
My mother works on the flowers, dropping the dead ones into the garbage, stacking the live ones beside the sink. “Be sure you and your father stop by my mother’s lodge.”
Lum shrugs.
“We haven’t talked to him in a long time.” My mother holds a flower up to the light. Most of the blossoms are dead, and I figure she’s going to dump it. But she snips at it here and there and she winds up with a single flower on a spindly stem. “Not since the accident.”
I’m sorry my mother has brought this up. Lum nods and chews at one of his fingers. “He’s been busy.”
My mother lays the flower on top of the live ones and takes down the big blue vase. “You know you’re always welcome.”
“Sure.” Lum is already moving towards the door. Soldier is right behind him.
“We got to get going,” I say.
My mother shakes the water off the flowers and puts them in the vase. For a moment, I think she’s going to say something else, but she doesn’t. Instead, she runs her fingers gently through the flowers, fluffs them so they spread out like an umbrella, and sets them in the sun.
The skull is the problem. Any one of these theories works fine until I get to the skull. The easiest way to manage it is to forget it altogether. It probably has nothing to do with the woman. There are bones all over the coulees. Lum and I have found plenty. Cows, rabbits, skunks, coyotes, deer. Rib bones, leg bones, jaw bones with teeth, back bones. Skulls.
When we were living in Bright Water, Lum and I would take some of the more interesting bones we found to my grandmother, who knew her bones.
“Skunk,” my grandmother would say. “This is skunk.”
Neither Lum nor I could tell the difference, so all we could do was guess. “This one is a…deer? Right?”
My grandmother would bring the bone up to her ear, as if she were listening for something. Sometimes she’d smell it. And then she’d set to running her fingers all along the length and around the curves until she found what she was looking for.
“Cow,” she’d say. “Right here. Cow.”
The railroad tracks run east and west, and cut Truth in half. If you’re in a car, you can only get from one side of town to the other at the level crossings, but if you’re on foot, you can cross anywhere you can scale the fence or find a hole in the wire.
The main railroad yards are to the southeast behind a low swell. You can’t see the yards or the round house or the repair sheds from town, and if it weren’t for the smoke and the noise of the cars being shunted onto sidings and the main track, you might not even know the yards were there at all. Four sets of tracks run through Truth, but in the yards, the tracks lie beside each other twenty deep with lines of boxcars and engines stacked so close that when you pass between them, it feels as if you’re walking down a narrow hallway or along the bottom of a ditch. Here everything is always in slow motion, cars swaying forward and back along the steel rails, trunk to tail, like a chorus line of elephants.