Somewhere behind the first string, a yard engine slams into a line of cars, and we can hear the brittle creak of metal as brake lines are released and cars are shunted and dropped and added. Several of the boxcars are open. Lum walks the line until he finds a straw car. “This one,” he says, and he climbs in.
The straw cars are fruit cars, and at this time of the year, most of them are packed with melons. The cars are unloaded before they get to Truth, but if you catch them before they hit the wash line, sometimes you can find a melon that is mostly good, buried among the smashed and rotting pieces.
Lum lies down in the straw. “Check it out.”
I don’t figure I’m going to find anything, but I kick my way through the straw just in case. Soldier jumps on the straw and burrows into a corner until all you can see is his butt. It’s cool inside, but already I can hear the heat swelling the sides of the steel car, and I can feel the heavy smell of rotting fruit rising out of the straw.
“Find anything?”
“Just pieces.” I go over and stand by the door, just in case someone comes along the tracks and catches us in the car. “We could always wash boxcars,” I say. “It isn’t a great job, but it’s a job.”
“Washing boxcars isn’t a job.” Lum stands up, sets his feet, and pretends he’s holding one of the high-pressure hoses the washers use to clean the cars. “It’s an adventure.”
“There are worse things than washing boxcars.”
“Whoooosh!” Lum yells, and pulls the valve open.
In the cool dark of the car, I watch Lum play the hose into the corners and along the floor, and I imagine the water exploding under the straw and breaking against the metal walls like waves trying to come ashore.
I figure the skull is prehistoric. The whole area around Truth and Bright Water is full of dinosaur bones, and it makes sense that you might find a prehistoric human skull mixed in with prehistoric animals. Maybe that’s why the skull is small. Maybe it’s not a child’s skull after all. Maybe humans who lived back then didn’t have very big heads.
Or maybe the bluff was once a burial ground. Maybe at one time we buried our dead there and then forgot about it. Maybe if you dug down a little in the grass and the clay, you’d find entire tribes scattered across the prairies. Such things probably happen all the time. A little rain, a little wind, and a skull just pops out of the ground.
Lum comes over and sits down in the doorway and dangles his feet off the side of the boxcar. The sun bends in from the south, rushes past us, and pours into the car. Lum reaches out and taps a round dance rhythm on the metal door.
“If we don’t get jobs,” I tell him, “we won’t have any money.”
“So, what else is new?”
Lum picks up the rhythm and the power, using his knuckles to drum the door. “I know guys who make their living on the powwow circuit.”
“Like who?”
“Nobody from around here,” says Lum. “But we could.”
“Drumming?”
“Drumming, singing, dancing.” Lum switches to an intertribal. “You spend the winter learning to sing and dance, and as soon as spring comes, you pack everything into a pickup or a van and you head out on the circuit.”
“We don’t have a car.”
“We’d have to get one.”
“What do you make?”
“Gas money, food, if you’re just average. Prize money if you’re good.”
“Sounds okay.”
“You know how to sing?” says Lum.
“Nope.”
“Drum?”
“Nope.”
The whole time he’s talking, Lum is hammering the door with his fist. It’s as if he’s forgotten what his hand is doing. The fist is moving pretty fast, but you can see that the skin around the knuckles is beginning to redden and crack.
“That’s what I want to do.”
“Go to powwows?” I say.
“No,” says Lum, “get out of Bright Water.”
One time, when I took some bones over to my grandmother, I asked her why everything came in threes.
“Who told you that?”
“Dad mentioned it.”
“Ah,” she said. “That explains it.”
“So, he’s right?”
“Wouldn’t know. My mother said everything came in fours.”
“Fours, huh?”
“Deer,” she said, “have four legs.”
“What about birds?”
“And turtles have four legs.”
“Yeah, but people only have two legs.”
“In the olden days, when we were smarter,” my grandmother said, looking straight out the kitchen window, “we had four.”
Lum stops drumming the side of the car and wipes his hand on his jeans. “Did I tell you we got skins at Happy Trails?”
“Cherokees, right?”
“They pulled up in a bunch of beat-up trailers, like the one your grandmother has.”
“They’re here for Indian Days, right?”
“Why else would they come?”
“Lucille and Teresa are praying for Germans.”
Lum jumps down onto the gravel between the long strings of boxcars and flatbeds and tankers, and unzips his fly. “My father’s hoping for a bunch of Americans. He’s got this new scheme.”
“What is it?”
“You’ll have to see it to believe it.” Lum rocks his hips back and forth as if he’s trying to write his name in the gravel.
“Give me a hint.”
Lum zips his pants up and starts jogging along the line of cars. Soldier and I jog with him. As long as he doesn’t go any faster, I can keep up. Our shoes crunch on the stones as we go, and the echoes carry off the railway cars, strange and dangerous, as if we are stepping on eggs. Or running on bones.
Lum takes the stopwatch from around his neck and hands it to me. Up ahead, I can see where the boxcars end. Lum presses the pace, and we leave the shelter of the cars and angle out across the corner of the yard to where an old wooden trestle bridges an open oil pit. In the distance, a locomotive comes towards us, dragging a string of cars.
“What about jobs?”
“Time me!”
Lum breaks ahead of me, and I can see that he’s not going to wait, that he’s decided to race the train to the trestle. Soldier goes with him. I’m already slowing down when the train roars past me. The noise and the wind throw me off my stride, but it doesn’t matter because I’m not trying to prove anything.
“Soldier!”
Lum is flying across the yard at a dead run. He takes the angle and catches the engine at the swing of the curve, runs alongside it until the embankment rises to meet the trestle and the gravel shoulder begins to narrow and falls away. Soldier goes as far as the gravel shoulder before he calls it quits, but he’s not happy about being left behind. He stands by the side of the tracks and barks as Lum runs alongside the engine.
You can see that Lum’s going to run out of room, that he’ll be forced to give it up, to peel off and come back down the embankment. But instead of slowing down, Lum drops his head and kicks hard, and as the slope disappears, he sidesteps onto the tracks just ahead of the engine and leads the train across the bridge.
I can’t imagine that the train people are too happy about Lum’s being on the tracks in front of them. But they don’t blow their whistle and they don’t slow down, so maybe they’re busy with something else and haven’t noticed him. Or maybe they don’t care.
One thing is for sure. If he slips on the gravel or stumbles on a tie, he’s dead.
But he doesn’t. He stays just out of reach of the train, and all the way across the bridge he holds it off, until the tracks begin the climb out of Truth, and the train loses speed and begins to fade.
The idea that the skull is prehistoric or has come from an old burial ground is fine until you get to the dirt. Once, when Lum and I were out on the coulees, we found a ground squirrel skeleton just below the prairie grass. The skull was a tiny thing, but when I dug it out, it was heavier than I would have guessed.
“Look at this.” I tossed the skull to Lum, and he held it up to the light and shook it.
“Ground squirrels,” said Lum, and he stuck a stick into an eye hole. “They got dirt for brains.”
The skull was filled with dirt, as if it had been poured in hot and left to set and cool. Both of us worked on it with sticks, but the dirt was like the bone itself, and after a while we gave up. Lum put the skull on a rock and crushed it with his foot. Even then, after you peeled the pieces of bone away, the dirt remained intact, hard as stone.
But the skull we found on the Horns was clean. Inside and out, it was clean. Almost spotless. As if someone had taken the time to wash and polish it before setting it in the grass for us to find.
Soldier and I wait in the shade of the boxcars to see if Lum is going to stop and circle back to check the time, but he has already made the top of the grade and is moving fast out across the long flat that follows the river to Prairie View.
Against the arch of a cloudless sky, he looks like a dark bird gliding low across the land.
O
ne year, when we were still all living together in Bright Water, my mother decided we should take a vacation. I voted for the West Edmonton Mall. I had seen brochures of the place, and Lucy Rabbit had even been there and said it was neat. But my mother wanted to go camping, to get into nature and see stuff like animals and scenery. I told her we saw that all the time, but she said the mountains were different. She wanted to go to Waterton Lake, hike around a little, and maybe rent a cabin on the water for a week or so.
My father didn’t want to go anywhere. He had too much work to do, he said, and needed to get it done.
“Doesn’t stop you from going to Prairie View when you want to go.”
“That’s business.”
“So is this,” my mother told him. “Family business.”
In the end, my mother got her way, and we borrowed a tent and some sleeping bags from Lucy Rabbit’s brother Gorman and a cook-stove from Franklin, and we packed the truck up and headed for the Rockies.
“What am I going to do?” I asked my mother.
“You can fish.”
“That’s the second-to-last thing I want to do.”
Waterton Lake looked like one of those postcards that Gabriel Tucker had in his sporting goods store for the tourists who stopped in for hunting licences and bullets. There was an old hotel on a hill overlooking the lake, and, of course, my mother had to stop just to see the place. It was old, and it smelled old, and the people who were sitting around in the lobby looked old. There were a couple of tour buses parked out front and everyone on the buses was over fifty at least. I saw a couple of kids, but they were dressed like their
parents and moved around as if they had never been outdoors in their entire lives.
My father stayed outside and smoked a cigarette. “I’m going to watch the view,” he told my mother. “And think about the money I’m losing.”
The inside of the hotel was mostly logs and planks and big branches, and my mother dragged me back and forth, reading a bunch of boring junk out of one of the colour brochures that someone had left lying about on a table.
“Take a guess at how old this hotel is.”
“Who cares?”
My mother went to the front desk to see how much a room would cost. She came back smiling and said that they had a few vacancies left, and that we could get a nice room for one hundred and fifty dollars.
“Is there a pool?”
“The lake’s right there.”
“That much for just a room?”
“It’s a world-heritage resort.”
My father stayed outside, smoking and looking at the lake, so he didn’t get to hear about the price of the room until we were setting up our tent at the campsite. “How much?”
“That’s what they said.”
“Must be why this sorry-ass campsite is costing us twenty bucks.”
“Why?”
“Because we get a view of the hotel.”
My mother cooked up some rice and hot dogs and we got some soft drinks out of the cooler. After we had eaten, we sat on stumps and watched the sun settle into the lake. “What do you think now?” she asked me.
I should have told her that I was beginning to like Waterton Lake, just to make her happy, but I didn’t. “Don’t worry,” she told me, “tomorrow’s going to be a lot more fun.”
It rained all the next day. We sat in the tent and played rummy and fish. The tent leaked a little at one side, and we had to keep shifting around because our legs would get cramped. Every so often, my
father would unzip the flap and go out into the rain. We’d wait for him, look at our cards, and plan our strategies. After a while, he would come back in, wet, and we would begin again. I did most of the talking.
“They should put in a miniature golf course. I bet they could make a lot of money off that.”
My mother didn’t mind the rain. It was an adventure, she said. After each hand, she would carefully add up the scores and write them on the back of one of the brochures she had picked up at the Prince of Wales Hotel.
My mother was right, of course. The mountains were different from Truth and Bright Water. In the mountains, everything was bowed in and close. On the prairies, you could see forever. In the mountains, the air felt heavy and dark. On the prairies, the air was light and gold.
The next morning, the rain stopped and we went for a walk along the lakeshore. My father and I had a contest skipping stones across the lake. “So, what do you think?” he said.
“About what?”
“Your mother’s vacation.”
“It’s okay.”
“Pretty exciting playing rummy in a wet tent,” he says. “And the mosquitoes are a lot of fun, too.”
“Rain’s stopped now.”
“Your mother wants to hike to Crypt Lake.” My father picked up a large, flat rock and threw it sidearm so hard I was sure it was going to bounce up and rattle off across the surface all the way to the far shore. Instead, it buried its nose in the water and sank immediately. “And she wants to take a boat ride up the lake and back.”
“Great.”
My father stood on the shore and watched the spot where the rock had disappeared, as if he expected it to come floating to the surface. “And that,” he said, spitting into the lake, “is your lesson for today.”
My mother walked behind us. Every so often, she would stop, bend over and pick up a small stone, and put it in her pocket. Sometimes my father would wander off ahead, looking for larger
rocks to throw in the lake, and I would be left alone between them. Most of that day, we walked along the shore tossing rocks in the water until my shoulder started to ache, and then my mother got out the map she had picked up at the ranger’s station and said we should climb a small hill called Bear Hump.
“It’ll give us a view of the lake and the mountains and the prairies all at once.”
“Got that already,” said my father.
“If it’s clear,” my mother said, “we’ll be able to see all the way into the United States.”
Going up Bear Hump wasn’t too hard, and I got to lead. We stopped twice on the climb so my father could have a cigarette. My mother was right. The view was great. And it kept changing. The sun would go in and out of the clouds, and when it went in, the lake turned deep green and grey, and when it came out, the lake flashed silver and black. My mother stood on the edge of the cliff with her arms wrapped around her. My father sat on the edge of a rock and swatted deer flies.
That evening, after we got back, my father told us that he had to go into town. “Forgot something,” he said.
My mother was not happy about this. “Can’t it wait?”
“It’s business.”
“What about our vacation?” said my mother.
“You mean your vacation.”
“All right,” my mother said, “what about my vacation?”
“I’ll be back before you know it.”
After my father left, the rain returned, gently this time, and my mother and I sat in the tent with the flap open and watched the clouds pour in over the lake.
I figured my father would show up the next morning, but he didn’t, and by noon my mother gave up.
“Let’s go for that boat ride,” she said.
“What about dad?”
“He can catch up.”
The cruise around the lake was interesting, and if I hadn’t gone, I would never have known that the Canadian/United States border ran
right through the middle of the lake. When the guy driving the boat told us that, I expected to see a floating fence or inner tubes with barbed wire and lights, something to keep people from straying from one country into the other. There was a cutline in the trees along with border posts on opposite sides of the shore, and a small border station to mark the line. We floated over to the station and the boat driver rang his bell and we all waved.
When we got back to camp, there was still no sign of my father. We had plenty of food, and we had the tent, and the townsite was right there, so we were in good shape.
“So, what do we do now?”
“Tomorrow,” said my mother, “we go to Crypt Lake.”
We didn’t go to Crypt Lake. My mother slept in the next morning. I waited to see what was going to happen, but I finally gave up and walked over to the lake and practised skipping stones. I practised until I got hungry, and then I went back to the tent. The flap was open. The food was waiting for me in the cooler, but my mother had disappeared. I figured she had gone to the bathroom or something like that, but when she didn’t come back, I went looking for her. I found her sitting in a chair in the lobby of the hotel. She was in a corner by herself in front of the windows that overlooked the lake.
“You okay?”
“This is what vacations are all about, you know.”
“Sitting?”
“Relaxing,” said my mother.
There were sailboats on the lake with bright white sails, and in the bay around the corner from the lake itself, a tour boat was just pulling away from the docks. “We could still go to Crypt Lake.”
“No point in doing everything the first trip,” she said. Her eyes were heavy and her hair was pulled straight back away from her face and tied with a rubber band.
“So, what do you want to do?”
“Sit,” she said. “I think I’d like to sit.”
My mother sat in the hotel all day. In the evening, she came back to the tent and we had dinner. “There’s a bus at seven,” she told me, after we had cleaned up.
“What about dad?”
We packed everything up and carried the tent and the stove and the sleeping bags and the cooler into the townsite, and waited for the bus at the Petro-Can station.
“Maybe his truck broke down.”
“Maybe it did.”
As soon as we got settled in our seats, my mother closed her eyes. I don’t think she was asleep, but she didn’t talk and she didn’t move the whole trip. I leaned against the glass and watched the road, just in case I spotted my father coming back to bring us home.