Bone Coulee (10 page)

But Mac’s the kind of man who doesn’t have to say a thing to be noticed…a man of the west even if he doesn’t ride a horse. His looks help, with his attractive hair turned a healthy grey, bushy brows and blue eyes that twinkle.

Jane’s the kind of woman who’s hard to resist. She’s the kind of woman who seems to ooze with that something that makes Mac want to simply reach out and touch her wrist.

“I’m curious to know who got you to interview an old dirt farmer like me,” Mac says.

“University of Regina. Last winter I gave a talk at their school of journalism. It just so happened that I ran into an archaeologist in the faculty lounge. He said that he had been out to this area. Said something about a buffalo jump and to be sure to look you up.”

“He showed me a lot of things I didn’t know about my own place,” Mac says. “You’d like to see the jump?”

“There’s a young Aboriginal artist living here in Duncan, isn’t there? In Regina I stopped in at the First Nations University. When they heard that I was filming out here, they mentioned something about this artist getting a job. I’d like to meet her.”

“She’s my neighbour.”

“But this Bone Coulee sounds intriguing.” She looks Mac straight in the eyes. “I’d like to see it.”

“I can take you in my new truck.”

“Oh….”

She stands up from the table, her hands at her hips, fumbling with the edges of her blazer.

“That is if you’d care to…” Mac says, and he stands facing her.

“I’d never turn down an offer of a ride with an old cowboy in a new truck,” Jane says.

“I can’t take you there today. I’m heading out to my son’s farm. But you can come along there, if you’d like. You’ll see an example of today’s Saskatchewan farm.”

This morning is Mac’s first opportunity to try out his new truck. The dealer from Bad Hills delivered it right to the house. Mac would have walked to the café for the interview, had he not been pressed for time. He had fretted that for sure Sid or Pete would come up with some smart crack about getting his new truck cultivator-proofed. It’s the first time in Mac’s life that he didn’t want to be seen driving a new vehicle.

Mac leads the way to the farm, Jane with him, and the cameraman following with the van. Before they get to the farmyard, they meet Lee coming up the road with his high-clearance sprayer.

“That’s Lee coming now,” Mac says. “Prime example of technological change in agriculture.” They watch as Lee swings off the road, sprayer booms spread wide. The camera aims at the lentil field.

“Is he spraying weeds?” Jane asks.

“Likely, but that’s not what he’s out there for. He’s going to desiccate lentils.”

“Dry them? You mean, kill the plants?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Weather’s the great arbiter. The whole month of August was cool and wet, and the lentils didn’t know what else to do but stay green and keep growing. In order to produce seeds, a lentil plant needs heat stress. We had some heat in July, so they podded some then, but nothing since. Only leaves. The cool and wet weather canopied the plants into perfect shelters for fungus growth. Lee has had to spray them with Bravo three times.”

“Are there other ways for the plants to dry out? Like just their natural life cycle?”

“Sure. Heat. But if they stay wet, only a hard frost will kill them. Lee swathed another field. That was a month ago, and with the swaths getting rained on, he’s had to turn them twice.”

“Is that what he’s going to do now? Swath this field?”

“No, he’s spraying with Reglone. Desiccating. Reglone will kill anything that’s green. And if the weather stays good now, he’ll straight-combine next week.”

Lee rides high in the sprayer’s cab, like a Darth Vadar figure or some such space-age prodigy. The machine appears spread-out, alive, a monster dragonfly mounted on high wheels, spewing sputum from its wobbly wings.

“Get a shot of that!” Jane says. A white curtain of froth shoots down from the wide sweep of nozzles as the sprayer tracks across the field.

“I shouldn’t say it,” Jane says. “I don’t know anything about farming, but I get a feeling of something sinister about this.”

“Something sinister about the John Deere price tag, I’d say. And if you really want
sinister
,” Mac says with a wink, “here she is now, big as life.”

Darlene jogs up the road. She’s doing her daily three-mile run. Darlene shakes her head and flaps her hands in the air, motioning to the camera to turn its focus away from her.

“Let me get myself together,” she says, bending forward with her hands on her knees, taking deep breaths. She pulls off her
headband and wipes perspiration from her neck. “Myself together, just a little. Before any pictures….”

“My daughter-in-law,” Mac says. “Darlene. And this is Jane.”

“You run every day?” Jane asks.

“I like to. But it’s hot and humid for October.”

“Mr. Chorniak says the farmers need some hot weather.”

“I suppose,” Darlene says as she turns her attention to Mac’s new truck. “Wow! That was quick, and brand spanking new…. You’re coming for lunch,” she tells Mac. “And Jane. You have time to join us? And your camera crew.”

“We’d love to,” Jane says.

“I’ve just taken three saskatoon pies hot out of the oven.”

Mac can see that they don’t need him to carry the conversation. He walks off to venture into the field with its smell of Reglone. He stoops to pull a handful of lentil plants. The few pods from the early growth in July are dried to a light brown. He shakes them and the seeds rattle. The plants aren’t slimy, so the three applications of Bravo must have worked. But the later green growth hasn’t podded. Lee won’t get enough out of this crop to pay for his chemical.

“Jane would like to meet Angela Wilkie,” Darlene says.

“So she’s told me,” Mac says.

The camera turns slowly in full circle; east, north, west, south.

“The contrasts are so hidden,” Jane tells Mac and Darlene. “Everything the same; just field after field of farmland. A flat tabletop. The wheat province. The hidden parts are in the valleys? Your Bone Coulee? I can’t wait to see the buffalo jump. It must really have a special meaning for the young artist.”

“When do you want to go out there?” Mac asks.

“The day of the fair, when you unveil the cairn.”

“Let’s go up to the house,” Darlene says. “By the time I get lunch on, Lee should be done this field.”

“You go ahead,” Mac says. “I’d like to just sit out here awhile.”

“We’ll go ahead in the van,” Jane says.

Mac knows each field. He knows where he’s dug out rocks, a few blasted with dynamite. He knows the difference in yield on a hilltop compared to that of a draw. Where Jane, the big-city girl, doesn’t even see the hillsides and draws, let alone what they might yield. All she sees is a tabletop.

He doesn’t sit long; Mac just wanted a few minutes to himself. Not that he minded Jane riding along with him to the farm. He’s come for materials to build a cage for Angela’s owl. Lee tore down an old fence and left the posts in a pile at the edge of the field. A few of those would work for a cage, and there is an old roll of chicken wire stowed in the barn loft.

Mac parks on the ramp by the loft doors. He won’t try to open them, as the twelve-foot doors might break apart, being stiff and dried up, brittle with age. He walks around to the barn entry at the front. The first thing he notices is how clean and shiny everything is; not like a barn, but more like an antique showroom. The oakwood stalls have a glow to them, and they are all empty, except where he keeps his John Deere D. Garth has his ’68 Plymouth Sport Fury convertible parked in the alleyway. He restored it all by himself during his Grade 11 and 12 years when he went to Bad Hills one morning a week for his shop class.

Mac climbs the staircase into the loft. Most barns would just have a wall ladder, but this one’s got an actual staircase. Light shines through the high windows. Pigeons flutter. The fir struts and rafters have a deep red shine to them, the effect of the sun’s rays beaming in at them.

The old hay slings still hang down from the high roof. Some old straw bales, covered with pigeon droppings, are stacked up against the far wall. Along with the bales are two Model T tires still on their rims, burlap potato sacks tied up in a bundle, a sheet of tin, a rolled-up binder canvas that mice have chewed and the roll of chicken wire he’s come to get. Pigeon droppings also cover the rounded lid of Mac’s grandmother’s hope chest, stored up here and forgotten.

•
Chapter
8
•

I
n the back yard Roseanna exercises with her walker,
and notices Chorniak’s truck with the chicken wire in his back yard. Last night Glen came for Angela’s dog. She told him it would scare the owl, and that a dog shouldn’t be tied up anyway. She’s had to keep it tied up just because of Mrs. Rawling’s Pekinese. Roseanna wants nothing to do with an owl in a cage in her back yard. Last night she told Angela, “The owl’s gone.”

“No,” Angela said. “Mr. Chorniak’s going to build a cage for
it.”

“In his back yard,” Roseanna said.

“No, I think, here. I brought it here in the first place, so I should look after it. Just until it can fly again.”

“Maybe it can teach you something then; how to hex Chorniak.”

Glen only laughed. He said he would take the dog because he didn’t like to see it tied up, but as for the place to put an owl cage, he’d leave it up to them and Mac Chorniak.

Roseanna adjusts the nozzle of the oxygen tube under her nose, and with a piece of twine ties her walker to the oxygen tank that’s attached to a little cart. What if the other day she’d gone to the café when those people were there? The woman could have interviewed her. Duncan has a much bigger story, Roseanna
would have said. Does anybody remember Thomas Desjarlais’s home run? she would have said. I’m his sister, she would have said.

Roseanna clunks up the alley. It would be so much easier if the walker had wheels. She grins. How many centuries did Indians survive without wheels? On one side of her is the Esther woman’s place with the yappy dog. On the other side, Chorniak. His back door opens, and Chorniak himself steps out.

She has the opportunity; he’s coming out with a bag of garbage to put in the can. She can’t look. If only her walker had wheels so she could get on her way faster. He’s watching her; he’s standing there holding his garbage-can lid and watching her. Keep moving, Roseanna,
clunk, clunk, clunk.

“You don’t have to pull that rig behind you,” Mac says. “Just lay the tank in your basket under the seat.”

Should she tell him to come and do it then? Roseanna keeps moving. Lift the walker,
clunk;
lift the walker,
clunk.

“Here,” Mac says. “You don’t want to get your feet tangled up in your hoses, or the twine. You could trip.” He unties the twine and removes the tank from its carrier.

“There,” he says as he lays the tank and plastic hose in the basket.
“I’ll take the cart and set it in your backyard.”

She nods once, then looks down at the toes of her Nike runners.

“Thank you,” she says, as she lifts her head to fix her gaze straight up the alley. She lifts the walker,
clunk.
“I have to go. Goodbye.”
Clunk.
First thing she will tell Angela when she sees her is to go to the health centre in Bad Hills and trade this thing in for one with wheels.

The alley is rutted, and when Roseanna finally gets to the street, she finds that it has been freshly gravelled all the way to the fairgrounds. She remembers the truck stuck in the mud. There is no more lumberyard, and no more mudhole street. In place of the horse barn is a new skating rink, and they have moved the old barn across the fairgrounds, to the aspen bluff where the camp used to be.

She clunks her way to the fairgrounds and finds it easier to walk on the level ground that once was the racetrack. The day of the sports day she smelled horses, and she smelled potato chips frying. At night before the white guys came, she smelled wild roses. She approaches the aspen bluff and, as at the place of Thomas’s grave, the leaves tremble like wands of feathers.

She struggles to get her walker through the trees and into the clearing where the camp was. The slough with the cattails is still there and mushrooms pop out of the ground here and there. She needs to take a piss.

She pulls down on the elastic waist of her sweatpants, and with both hands on the handles of her walker, she squats. As she pees, she notices bits of trash poking up through the leafy ground: the neck of a Coke bottle, rusted sardine cans. She pulls up her pants, then breaks a branch from a tree. She scratches through the dirt to find the two pieces of the doll that she doesn’t remember throwing in the trash heap. The same doll, but in two pieces. The same dark plastic, only stained in its weathering. How is it that she has found the doll? Has the Creator brought her here? And what does the Creator wish her to do with it? Roseanna holds the two pieces together at the waist. When that young ballplayer gave the doll to her it was so beautiful with its dark colour, and she thought that she too might be beautiful.