Bone Coulee (13 page)

“The old lady gave you the once-over a few times,” Nick says. “Maybe she wants your body.”

Pete aims at the side pocket.
“Whack!”
The eight ball drops. “That will be a dollar from each of you,” he says, and then he sinks the one ball, the number on his pea. “And another five dollars each.”

“Jeepers! Just my luck,” Jeepers says. “It was my turn to shoot next, and my nine was right by the hole!”

“I wonder if they do know something?” Sid asks. “Have they said anything to you, Mac?”

“It’s nothing to do with that. The young one teaches at the college in Bad Hills, and she lives here because the rent’s cheap.”

“Are they treaty Indians?” Nick asks. “From Three Crows?”

“The guy from Three Crows who bought my land is the artist’s brother,” Abner says.

“Anyway,” Pete says to Mac, “don’t get in too deep, and I’d watch out for that old lady.”

•
Chapter 12
•

I
f Roseanna has grievances about the past, her
daughter is not without the same feelings. So many wrongs, for so many years, on both sides. But unlike her mother, she doesn’t have a concrete picture of the past wrongs. Angela’s pictures are abstract. The death of an uncle who died long before she was born doesn’t affect her the way it does her mother. Angela sees nothing of this on the face of Mac Chorniak. All she detects is the kind look of an old man. Without her mother’s obsession for revenge, Angela verges on feelings of guilt because her focus is more and more on her new job.

The regional college let Angela know that someone in Bad Hills wants to get rid of an old deep-freeze. All they have to do is get somebody to pick it up. Until now she’s kept her willow canes in the freezer that’s in the house, taking only enough for her first few sessions with her students. Now she will be able to store what she’ll need for the course and won’t have to worry about the bark drying up. She has the osiers tied in bundles in the back of her panel truck, ready for the trip to Bad Hills.

Last night she did have a hard time getting to sleep, as she kept thinking about the stone duck. Her mother has been no help. Angela couldn’t free her mind from Roseanna’s words:

“Report Chorniak to the authorities!”

First she harped on about the stone duck, and then she switched to the owl. She raved on about being left alone to contend with it.

“It’s your owl, not mine,” she said. “Why aren’t you working its magic on Chorniak?” Then she’d get back to the duck:

“It is a sign. The coulee’s spirit shows itself to us, not to Chorniak.”

In the middle of the night Angela tossed and turned, in and out of dreams. Owls hooted and black ravens croaked,
“Magic! Magic! Magic!”

Before she leaves town, she stops at the café for a package of gum. As she steps back outside, an air horn blasts three times from a semi parked across the street. A young man up in the cab waves to her.

“You must be the artist,” he says, jumping down from the cab. “Got time for a coffee?”

“Pardon me?”

“I’m Garth Chorniak. You know my mother. Not every day on the streets of Duncan do I get the chance to meet a real live artist, and one that’s so good looking.”

“Is that a bribe?”

“Come on. The coffee’s on me, and we’ll see if Tung Yee’s got any of them bagels. Nothing better for breakfast than a hot bagel with cream cheese.”

“That’s a trucker’s breakfast?”

“An artist’s breakfast. We’d get along just fine.”

“Oh, you think so? I’m to fall for all your sweet talk?”

“Are you in a rush to go some place?”

She should just walk away. He must think he’s God’s gift to women. Or does he talk to white girls like this? But she might find some way to use him….

“What do you say…? Coffee?”

“I like cream cheese and bagels.”

Tung Yee greets them at the door.

“You got cream cheese and bagels?” Garth asks.

“Toasted. I get it right away,” Tung Yee says. “Start with coffee. Or Angela want tea, like her mother?”

“Coffee might help keep me awake on the drive to Bad Hills.”

“Good strong coffee,” Tung Yee says. “Those men always want strong coffee. Kwok Ming tell them, not good for old men. Tea better. Young people, it is okay.” She pours two cups, then scurries to the kitchen.

“Not every day you meet an artist on the streets of Duncan,” Garth says.

“So you’re a patron of the arts?” Angela smiles. “Like your grandfather with his poetry?”

“You could say that I’m a bit of an artist. A bull rider, if that’s an artist. You’ll have to come and watch. The Bone Coulee Rodeo is coming up quick. I’ll be competing against some of your guys.”

“My guys?”

“Indians. And Métis riders. Some of the best in the business.”

Angela smiles again. He doesn’t seem to be patronizing. Bull riders are all the same, Indian or white.

“It’s the Bone Coulee Rodeo’s fortieth anniversary. My score’s close to getting me into the Canadian finals in Edmonton.”

“My brother Glen used to ride bulls.”

“Really?”

“Twelve years ago he took ‘the big cheque’ at Agribition.”

Garth’s eyes light up. “Rodeo goes a long way back around here. Grandpa says that his grandpa bought horses from the Métis at Round Prairie. The Métis would catch wild horses and break them in to sell to farmers. And they’d put on shows. One guy trained his horse to dive off a thirty-foot tower into a tank of water.”

“Hot toasted bagels!” Tung Yee says, setting the plates down, and then refilling their cups. Garth spreads cheese on his bagel and sets it back on the plate.

“Grandpa says that the world’s first trick riders were Ukrainian Cossacks. At last year’s rodeo a cowboy did The Cossack Drag. With one foot in the stirrup, the cowboy hung upside down along the horse’s side, so that his hands could touch the ground.”

“You’ve tried it?”

“Not yet. You think I want to kill myself? Grandpa says that a Cossack could pluck a kerchief off the ground with his teeth.”

“Speaking of teeth,” Angela says, “do you think maybe we should eat our bagels?”

Angela cuts hers in half, and then spreads cheese on each piece. Before she’s done that, Garth has eaten his.

“So your brother really did ride bulls?”

“Hmm…” She nods, then wipes her mouth with a napkin.

“You’re gonna have to come and watch me.”

“We’ll see. I have a sick mother to care for.” She slides her plate towards Garth.

“Half was enough for me,” she says.

“I’ll eat it on the way,” he says. “I’m hauling a B-train of malt barley to Biggar.”

“I can follow you,” Angela says. “I’m going to Bad Hills.”

Along the highway from Duncan to Bad Hills the land is flat and treeless, but on the distant south horizon gentle hills rise. Angela tries to imagine the look of the flat stubble fields when they were prairie grass and the buffalo grazed. She imagines how it must have been in the summer, with no shelter from the hot sun, and in the winter when buffalo faced a blizzard.

Halfway to Bad Hills she sees a buffalo herd, and she can’t help but think how at home these animals are, with their thick mats of fur on their massive shoulders, and how their twitching noses seem tuned to the wind.

The college in Bad Hills takes up part of the space in the old high school. To get there, Angela drives by the new high school. With its red roof and pagoda style, the building reminds her of a Pizza Hut. The student parking lot is filled with shiny new cars and half-ton trucks with chrome stacks up the back and oversized tires.

The old school is a box-like structure with the windows on the ground floor boarded over. A newly painted Prairie West Regional College sign hangs above the walk-up entry. Angela walks up the steps, opens a metal door to the building, then climbs a flight of stairs to the administration office.

“The deep-freeze is coming this morning?” Angela asks Susan at the front desk.

“Didn’t Mr. Huff say that he was bringing it around this morning when he comes to talk to the students?” Susan asks Brenda, the Co-ordinator II at her desk at the back of the room.

“In the box of his campaign truck, ”Brenda says. “At 11 o’clock.”

“Thanks so much,” Angela says. “I’ve kept the willow frozen at home, but we’ll need lots of it here, and I can’t let it dry out.”

“It took a bit to explain the need for a deep-freeze to my boss,” Brenda says. “Have you got the canes with you? I told Mr. Huff to back around to the shop entry. The welding class can carry it in.”

Darlene comes running up the stairs.

“We’ve got your freezer, Angela, and it’s already unloaded. Would you like to meet our next MLA?”

Pastor Eddy takes the stairs two steps at a time and enters the office with his right hand extended.

“This is Angela Wilkie,” Darlene says.

“And I’m Eddy Huff,” he says. “Darlene’s been telling me about you.”

He doesn’t look like a politician, or a preacher. He wears cowboy boots, jeans, belt buckle, polka-dot neck scarf and hat.

“Don’t mind my outfit,” he says. “Darlene’s idea. She’s made me into a walking advertisement for the Bone Coulee Rodeo.”

“In today’s world, image is everything,” Darlene says.

•
Chapter 13
•

R
oseanna sits on her walker parked by the owl
cage. When her daughter told her about making friends with the Chorniak grandson, she thought it might not be a bad idea, just like getting to know Jen Holt is not a bad idea. But Roseanna doesn’t know about the sister. This Esther Rawling woman talked Angela into being a judge for their fair, and she wants them over for tea this afternoon to see her quilts. Angela says she is a real busybody, like her puppy. It yaps at blackbirds roosting in the maple trees, and it yapped at Roseanna when she went with her walker up the lane. Angela says a pet gets to be like its owner, and she teases Roseanna that she’s spending too much time with the owl.

“Sly bird,” Roseanna says to it. “What all do you know?” They stare at each other. Roseanna rattles the chicken wire with a stick, then makes sounds by clicking her tongue. After a moment, the owl clicks its beak.

“I have a plan,” Roseanna says. “Angela, what are you doing this morning?”

“Some drawings of the town. Mrs. Rawling asked me if I’d show some pieces at the fair.”

“Draw the camp,” Roseanna says. “Where I found my broken doll.”

She returns her gaze back to concentrate on the owl.

“An owl flew over us that night at the camp. Draw a picture. Let the spirits guide you.”

This morning Angela wants to draw the grain elevator before it gets knocked down, and if she finishes in time, she’ll go to the campsite.

Angela imagines the empty elevator as near death. Later she will draw another picture during the elevator’s scheduled collapse, and later still another of an empty lot with a few half-buried boards showing on the surface.

The grain-boss elevator stands astride the plain, its business gone. Grass grows on its ramps like fuzz on carpet slippers. Workers swarm like ants on its thick ankles, emptying the building of what valuables can be removed. She draws the elevator’s resigned apprehension in the eyes of its broken windows, and in its slouched sag of submission.

She moves up the street to get a line on empty lots, the surviving post office, the vacant pool hall and the café. If she can locate old photographs, she’d like to draw a picture of the street in busier times, and another before there was a street.

From there she goes to the fairgrounds. Her mother told her that the campsite is to the northeast of the racetrack that no longer exists: no track, no judge’s stand, no white rail fence. But she sees the aspen bluff, and that is just what she is looking for.

She finds the clearing, but no evidence of anything left over from a camp, just the few rusted cans. How could there be anything after fifty-seven years? She will sketch regardless: the trees, the grassy area, the slough filled with cattails.

She draws two tents and a wagon stacked with willow pickets, and another picture of moving camp in a time before wheels – a picture of horses pulling travois. But she’d better hurry; she told Mrs. Rawling they’d come for tea at one.

Esther’s quilt is stretched out on a frame in the living room. Finished quilts are draped on sofas and chairs, and on the dining room table. Angela stands beside her, and Roseanna sits on a chair with the dog on her lap.

Esther scurries about the room from one quilt to the next, holding each one upright to show its pattern and name it:

“Log Cabin, The Cross and Crown,

Stacked Bricks, Trip Around the World,

Shoo Fly, Star, Rail Fence,

Court House Steps, Mohawk Trail,

Dresden Plate, Grandmother’s Flower Garden….

She lifts a quilt hanging from the back of her rocking chair. Each square has four different-coloured triangles sewn together, each square bordered with four-inch strips of floral Fortrel, polka-dot Fortrel and any and all of the patterns of the age of Fortrel.