A Geography of Blood (3 page)

If you've never squeezed into the cab of a tow truck with three dogs, you really haven't lived. So there we were, enveloped in clouds of warm dog breath, our vehicle dangling from a winch, forcibly returned to our starting point. Back in town, the mechanic at the gas station obligingly tweaked a thingamabob or two, replaced a widget that had blown, and expressed the hope that “she should be good to go.” Thus reassured, we set out next morning for Fort Walsh, a historic post of the fabled North-West Mounted Police, which lies in a picturesque valley just west of Maple Creek. New destination, same story. Five minutes west of Eastend, the van sputtered to the side of the road, and there we were on the end of a winch, being dragged back home.

You might think that by now we'd have received the message, but not so. It was only after our fourth outing, and our third tow back to town, that we finally gave up and submitted to the inevitable. For the time being at least, we were going nowhere. On the surface, the cause of our predicament was obvious—some intractable mechanical problem, not surprising in our old tin can, perhaps brought on by unfriendly weather and lamentable road conditions. Crazy thing, though: that wasn't the way we felt. Instead of registering as an inconvenience, our dramatic returns to Eastend took on the aura of an intervention, as if some Power Greater Than Ourselves had resorted to the means at hand to grab hold of our attention. (Bad weather, maybe I could accept that, but did the gods really speak through clapped-out Astro vans?) It was ridiculous, we knew, but even though we laughed and shook our heads, we couldn't quite shake the sense that we were being offered a teaching moment. “Stop,” a quiet voice kept saying. “Stay put. Pay attention to where you are.”

In the week since we'd left Wyoming, Keith and I had been in ceaseless motion, traveling across boundaries, over watersheds, through memory and forgetting, knowledge and ignorance, in the uncharted territory between history and legend. Now we stood on the divide between the mundane and the numinous, between the events of our everyday lives and the meanings that were speaking to us. “Stay put,” that still, small voice insisted. “Pay attention.”

{two} The Stegner House

Find yourself in the middle of nowhere.

Former Eastend tourism slogan

What we noticed
first was the silence. If you stood on the curb in front of the Stegner House and listened, you could feel your ears reaching for sounds, as if they were trying to stand up as sharp as a coyote's. Now and then, a vehicle whispered along the main drag a couple of blocks to the south, and every hour or so a truck hauling a load of huge round bales growled down a gravel road on the western edge of town. But apart from these brief transgressions, the houses on both sides of the street seemed to lie in a trance, as if even the ticking of their clocks had been silenced.

In the kitchen of the Stegner House, the prevailing quiet was broken by an aged refrigerator, which wheezed asthmatically in the performance of its duties. When the wind blew, the storm windows rattled in sympathy and the rooms filled with the rhythmic, wavelike whooshing of the spruce trees in the front yard. But inexplicably these sounds served only to signal an eerie absence of noise. The black rotary telephone beside the dining-room table did not ring. Although our hosts had foreseen all of our basic needs and comforts, they had neglected to provide a radio, and the antiquated TV in the living room, equipped with rabbit ears, could emit little more than hiss. (Our attempts to watch the Canadians beat the U.S. 3–2 in the gold-medal game of the Women's World Hockey Championship came to naught because the action appeared to be taking place in a blizzard.) With the van consigned to dry dock for as-yet-undetermined repairs, we did not even have the benefit of the radio there. We had been cast adrift, with nothing to guide us but our thoughts and our unaided senses.

Morning after morning, Keith woke to report strange dreams, many of them about his father, who had died, in England, six months earlier. “I've never dreamed anything like that,” he'd say, and then tell me how, in his sleep, he had looked at himself in a mirror and seen the face of his dead father looking back. Do you think it's this stillness? we asked each other. Do you think that staying busy, in constant commotion, is a way to keep from knowing what is really happening to us? Is that why people talk about “profound” silence? For my part, I slept dreamless, as if I were made out of wood, as if I were sleeping the rooted sleep of a poplar.

That was another thing: the dark. On clear, moonless nights just at bedtime, we'd often stand, shivering, in the backyard and gaze out into the universe. The darkness was as black as water, and you sensed that if you lost your footing, you might fall helpless into its depths. And the stars, stars beyond counting, streaming across the sky, all trillions of miles distant across an ether of space and time. “Stay put,” the voice had told us. “Pay attention to where you are.” We were in the yard of the Stegner House, on Tamarack Street, in the town of Eastend, Saskatchewan, at the foot of the Cypress Hills. We were whirling through space on the skin of a living planet.

In a town where everyone knows everyone else, visitors are painfully obvious. So we weren't surprised when, occasionally, someone stopped us on the street or in the grocery store and politely ran through the basics of who, what, why, when, and where. Were we enjoying our stay in Eastend? they'd ask in conclusion, and we were happy to oblige with a “yes.” But the aisles of the Co-op, between the tea and the tinned beans, didn't really seem like the place to talk to strangers about our inner lives. Instead, I might say that it was a treat to see cottontails and white-tailed deer grazing on people's lawns. Or in a more expansive mood, I would rhapsodize about the view from the room at the top of the Stegner House (where I should have been working but wasn't, though they didn't need to know that) and the way the land drew your eyes from the backyard across the alley to the creek, with its fringe of willows, and then up and away to the hills. Strange, misshapen hills that made me think of ancient, fantastical worlds.

If the questioner seemed particularly sympathetic, I might even admit to the homely pleasures of nostalgia. For walking the streets of Eastend that autumn was like walking onto a set for the movie version of my childhood. Although the prairie towns of my youth were hundreds of miles distant and decades in the past, this place was almost as I remembered them. The grain elevators that presided over Railway Street, though strangely unbusy, recalled the dry, half-forgotten aromas of grain dust and “chop.” The guys in ball caps who drew their half-tons up side by side in the middle of the main street looked familiar as they leaned out their cab windows to exchange shop talk. The kids on bicycles who, unafraid of strangers, stopped to talk to me and Keith could have been my childhood friends or models for paintings by Norman Rockwell. When the school bell rang to announce recess, it was all I could do to keep from hurrying over to the playground and looking for my own small self, shrieking with joyful dizziness on the merry-go-round or catching spiders in the tall grass along the fence.

If I were ever to lay claim to a hometown, it would have to be somewhere like this, a kind of simulacrum of all the places where my family had lived. Although my parents had both started out as teachers, my mother gave up her profession in the late 1940s to prepare for my birth, the first in what would become a family of three daughters. The result was that our family life, thereafter, was ruled by my father's career. Motivated sometimes by necessity and sometimes by boyish ambition, he moved from job to job and from success to success. Every time he changed jobs, and sometimes when he did not, we moved house. In my first fourteen years, we moved fourteen times.

I don't know how my mother put up with it, all that packing and unpacking, all that rending and rebuilding of life, but as a kid, I was remarkably open to the promise of a fresh start. Maybe this time I'd get a room of my own. Maybe the new town would have a better library than the last one or a befuddled, grandmotherly librarian who would pat me on the head and let me borrow books from the adult section. Yet even then, I sensed that these opportunities always came at a cost. With every move, we left behind friends and newly familiar places, losses that became more painful the more often they recurred. And even more troubling, because irrevocable, was the loss of a material connection to our personal past. Clothes we had outgrown, toys we no longer played with, doodles and scribblers stuffed into the bottom drawer of a desk: everything that we were unlikely to need in the future had to be discarded.

Why, I wondered, couldn't we be like the families I read about in books, who lived in mansions filled with treasures amassed in years long past by generations of swashbuckling uncles and shadowy spinster aunts? In particular, I yearned for an attic like the ones in which the young heroes and heroines of those novels launched their finest adventures, a midden of romantic old lamps, mysterious wardrobes, and battered trunks filled with lavender-scented letters.

“Did I ever tell you how I used to wish for an attic—” I ask Keith one day, but I can see that he's busy with his own thoughts. We are walking down the main drag in Eastend: on our right, we pass a romantic old brick bank that has been converted into a used bookstore. A few doors down, there's a mysterious storefront with a cracked window that, though vacant, still bears the boast of past glory as a “World Famous” antler exhibit. At the far end of the block, the former movie theater, somewhat battered but unbowed, carries the banner of the town's historical museum (at the moment unfortunately closed for the season).

“Look,” Keith says, pointing up a side street toward a squat brown building shaded by cottonwoods. “Does that sign really say ‘Cappuccino'?” Five minutes later, we are sipping espressos on the sunny patio at Alleykatz, an up-to-the-minute business that unexpectedly combines a coffee bar, a pottery studio, and a daycare. “Coffee, clay, and kids,” as Deb, the proprietor, cheerfully informs us. Okay, so Eastend isn't just a collection of relics that have washed up from my past. It's a living, breathing town, a valiant little vessel that, though missing a mast here and a sheet there, is sailing against the trends of rural depopulation. (It must be the dazzle of the wind and sun on the poplar leaves that puts me in the mood for nautical imagery.) Keith and I linger on the deck for an hour or so, nursing our coffees, watching people come and go, and filling our lungs to the brim with contentment.

I had left small-town life for good, without the slightest twinge of regret, the year I finished high school; that was 1967. The quiet that I now found so consoling had been intolerable to me then, and I remember fuming about the airlessness of small-town thinking, the smug, white-gloves-on-Sunday assurance that there is one correct answer to each of life's questions. God was in His Heaven, all was right with the world, and history was progressing under His beneficent supervision. In school and in the pulpit, this comfortable self-assurance had frequently found expression in a homespun myth, the epic saga of Western settlement.

Here was a story so glorious that even my teenage cynicism could do little to tarnish it, a story in which I could cast myself, vicariously, among the heroines. Back in the 1700s, my own ancestors had left Europe, crossed a perilous ocean, and faced a wild continent rather than betray their heart's convictions. My dad's people had been Swiss Anabaptists who, in a quest for religious freedom, had fled first to Pennsylvania, then (as pacifist refugees from the American Revolution) to Upper Canada, and finally as pioneers to Alberta. My mom's family, though on the opposite side of the religious controversy, had followed a similarly convoluted path. They were Roman Catholics who, forced from Portugal and then England, had settled in Maryland in the 1600s. When that refuge also failed them, they had resumed their migration, heading inland to settlements in Kentucky and then Missouri, before they too made the trek to the Canadian prairies.

Both lines had held strong to their religious convictions until the early 1900s, when at opposite ends of Alberta, my paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother had each broken with tradition by marrying outsiders. In other essentials, however, even these renegades remained true to the family heritage as they devoted their lives to bringing the prairie under cultivation and laying the groundwork of community life.

My parents had both grown up on homesteads, and my sisters and I used to beg our mother for stories of her childhood, as fabulous to us as Greek myths. Imagine riding to school on horseback or making butter with a stoneware churn or lying in the grass, watching fleets of flat-bottomed clouds float overhead. These borrowed memories came back to me here in Eastend, in the company of friendly ghosts, and especially during evenings in the Stegner House, itself a vestige of the pioneer era. Curled up on the couch in a pool of lamplight, with a dog at my feet, I again opened
Wolf Willow,
looking for confirmation of these honeyed stories.

What I found instead was an atmosphere of melancholy that I hadn't noticed in my earlier encounters with the book. “By most estimates,” Stegner confessed in his opening chapter, “including most of the estimates of memory, Saskatchewan can be a pretty depressing country.”
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Despite his rapturous reappraisal of the landscape a few pages later—“grassy, clean, exciting”—his memories were permeated by a sour whiff of disappointment. Stegner's father had been a hard-luck gambler, a man who staked his family's future on 320 acres of sun-scorched, wind-scoured prairie a hard day's drive south of town and who then, through the consecutive misfortunes of wheat rust, fire, and drought, had lost the toss. “My father did not grow discouraged,” Stegner recalled, “he grew furious. When he matched himself against something he wanted a chance to win. By 1920 he was already down in Montana scouting around for some new opportunity.”
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The family left for Great Falls the following year and then for Salt Lake City, where they settled in like a wind-blown drift of Russian thistles.

During their sojourn in Saskatchewan, the Stegners had spent summers on the homestead and winters in this house. It was here that, by Stegner's report, the entire family had nearly died in 1918 of the Spanish flu; here also that, in his words, “my grandmother ‘went crazy' and had to be taken away by a Mountie to the Provincial asylum because she took to standing silently in the door of the room where my brother and I slept—just hovered there for heaven knows how long before someone discovered her watching and listening in the dark.”
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In the cozy kitchen a few paces from where I sat reading, Stegner's father had once “clouted [him] with a chunk of stove wood,” sent him flying across the room, and broken his collarbone. The shadows cast by the lamp seemed to deepen, and the silence gathered as I read; these traumas were too close for comfort.

Fortunately for my peace of mind, the members of the Eastend Arts Council had provided another account of the settler experience that struck a more cheerful note. A weighty volume, bound in green and emblazoned with gold, too large for the bookshelves upstairs, it was tucked away with the phone book on the telephone table. Entitled
Range Riders and Sodbusters,
it had been published by the local historical society in 1984 as a tribute to “our” pioneers. “We record these stories with awe,” the editors wrote, aware “that this area had its definite beginnings in these stories never again to be relived and an era in history never to be repeated.”
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