Bone Coulee (21 page)

“I should have asked you earlier, but there is so much arranging, and I’m all by myself, you know.”

“You’re not alone, Esther. I’m here. Jen and Abner are here.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have Jen. She’s always been the strong one.”

“Do you think Bridget will eat these Chicken McNuggets?”

“Here, I’ll put some in her bowl.”

The dog sniffs at them. Her stub tail vibrates, and her body goes stiff like a cat ready to pounce on a mouse. And then she licks each piece of chicken, as if making up her mind. Finally she takes one in her mouth and carries it to the living room.

“She wants to eat in private this morning,” Esther says. “Or maybe, like me, she’s lost her appetite.”

“I’d better get going,” Mac says. “The grand opening. I don’t suppose you’ll be going?”

“I’d like to, if only to take my mind off things, but it wouldn’t, and I’d have to talk to people. That will be hard enough this afternoon.” Esther takes a jar from her fridge. “I made a pot of beef and barley soup yesterday and put it up in sealers. Not as tasty as what Peggy used to make, but…”

“Now, Esther. You know as well as I that it was you gave her the recipe.”

“I wish this day were done and gone.”

“So much happening all at once, Esther. Worse yet, the Wildlife banquet’s on for tonight. You’d think they’d have postponed it.”

“Just for a funeral?”

“I guess not, and my grandson wants me to go. Some of the local hunters are bringing in the mounts of the trophy deer. Last fall Garth scored second in the province for junior rifle.”

“You’d better go now,” Esther says, “if you want to dress up a little for the grand opening. Jane Smythe-Crothers will be there with her camera.”

“And I’d better go now,” Roseanna says.

“Oh yes. Thank you, Roseanna. For the pastry.”

“May the Creator be with you today, Mrs. Rawling, especially when your son had to die so young.”

Mac digs in his dresser drawer
and pulls out a black
tie. He’ll have to iron it. His mind is in a jumble, searching for what he’s going to say at the funeral. For weeks on end, nothing ever happens in Duncan. Now everything happens all at once. Rodeo this weekend. Saturday night fireworks, light show, country music. He’s been asked to sit up on the stage with the dignitaries.
Did Jane Smythe-Crothers get to the Three Crows cemetery, and if she did, what did she find?

He looks at himself in the mirror, wondering if he should shave now or wait until after lunch. He tries to remember what position Cameron played when Mac coached him in minor ball. Either second or third base. There might be something in one of Peggy’s scrapbooks, but he’d have to dig through the closets, or did they throw them out when they moved to town? He’s not dressing up just for Jane Smythe-Crothers to take his picture. Mac played a big part in the renovation, working with all that barnboard, so he should at least try to look presentable if she wants to ask him any questions.

He hunts through the kitchen cupboards for the iron, then up on the shelf in the bedroom closet. Where in heaven’s name did he put it? The last time he used the iron was to melt solder to fix a broken handle on an enamelled tin cup he had found out in the coulee. It’s likely on his workbench in the garage.

The cuckoo-clock chime of his doorbell rings. Mac comes out of the bedroom to find Abner standing in the kitchen.

“Going to the grand opening?” he asks.

“Just on my way,” Mac says.

“Getting all dressed up?” Abner asks, pointing to the tie in Mac’s hand.

“This?” Mac says. “Black tie’s for the funeral.”

“Damn sad thing,” Abner says. “Especially when it’s family. Jen is beside herself trying to come up with things that might lighten Esther’s grief.”

“It will take some time,” Mac says. “All we can do is show her that we care, and show her that we value Cameron. Do what we can to help her realize that his life was something more than what some people perceive; something more than just a life wasted.”

Mac and Abner take a seat at the table that’s closest to the door. The barnboard looks good on the walls. In fact everything looks good. It’s funny how things have changed. It used to be that people wanted things new and better, but there have gotten to be so many things new and better that nowadays everybody’s chasing after things old. A yoke from a team of oxen rests on an oak vinegar barrel. Darlene found both yoke and barrel in a Saskatoon antique store. A rusted barn lantern hangs from a nail on the wall. Three of Angela’s willow armchairs make a semicircle facing onto a gas fireplace. A spray of her dried flowers is arranged in a willow basket that sits on the trunk hauled down from the loft of the Chorniak barn. Books written by Saskatchewan authors are displayed on the fireplace mantelpiece.

Nick, Pete and Jeepers sit at a table that’s partially hidden behind the neck yoke. Their wives are at the table that’s closest to the coffee urns and glass-covered dessert bar. Sid stands beside the camera zooming in on Darlene, Angela and Jane, all three conversing from the willow armchairs. Roseanna sits in her wheelchair, dipping her straw in her cup of iced cappuccino. Pastor Huff and John Popoff hold on to the ends of a large red ribbon.

“And now,” Jane Smythe-Crothers says into the camera, “the grand opening of Duncan’s Dream Catcher Boutique!”

Sid steps forward. “As mayor of the Village of Duncan, I declare the Dream Catcher Boutique officially open.” He cuts the ribbon, and everyone claps.

John Popoff steps up, holding on to his half of the red ribbon, and says, “the premier asked me to extend his best wishes, and he congratulates the community’s efforts towards the growth of rural Saskatchewan.”

“And I too,” Eddy Huff says. “On behalf of the Saskatchewan Party and its leader, I applaud the entrepreneurial skills of Darlene Chorniak, farmer and rancher, and Angela Wilkie, Aboriginal artist. And let’s get the camera on Angela’s mother, Roseanna Wilkie. Yes, let us recognize our indigenous people, and let us support this boutique’s leadership in its display and merchandising of Native art.”

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Jane says. “I’m talking with the owners, Darlene Chorniak and Angela Wilkie. As you can see from the decor, someone has certainly been blessed with a superabundance of ideas. As someone from Toronto, I had no idea about
prairie culture
, or for that matter, whether there was anything at all between Alberta and Manitoba. What these two women have done with this boutique is a touch of the
prairie,
to say the least.”

Sid interjects: “Just one of REDA’s special projects.”

“REDA?” Jane asks.

“One of REDA’s projects:
Entrepreneurial Outreach.
As mayor, I’m Duncan’s representative on the Bad Hills Rural Economic Development Authority. REDA provides the cash flow designed to kick-start the local economy.”

Jane glances about the room. “You expect an increase in the tourist trade?” she asks Sid, “
or
are there enough local dollars?”

“Sid has the lion’s share of the local dollars,” Nick pipes up from behind the vinegar barrel.

“Angela does beautiful work,” Darlene says. “We still have to put up her charcoal sketches.”

“I viewed some of Angela’s work on fair day,” Jane says. “Truly exceptional. And as I still can’t get over it…so mysteriously prairie. So here we have it. Darlene Chorniak and Angela Wilkie, entrepreneurship and art. Two women of the prairie.”

“Prairie mystery?” Abner asks Mac. “Ever hear the likes of that before? She’ll end up having us all branded as some strange collection of people who have been out in the sun too long.”

“Maybe we have,” Mac says.

Jane examines the display of books on the mantelpiece.

“Local writers,” Sid says. “All from Saskatchewan.”

“Are the books for sale?”

“All part of the business,” Sid says. He takes a book down from the shelf. “A rancher north of Bad Hills wrote this one. He gave me a copy at last year’s rodeo. All cowboy poetry. He didn’t sell a whole lot. Not like the guy making belt buckles.”

Mac reads the titles of the used books that Darlene put in the old bookcase she brought in from the farm. A lot of them she got from Esther, and some were Peggy’s books.
Leave Her to Heaven, Main Street, How Green Was My Valley, Gone With the Wind.
And the book that Esther shoved on him last winter. She said it was Cameron’s favourite:
East of Eden.
He pulls it from the shelf because an idea has just come to him for Cameron’s eulogy. Mac will take the book home with him over lunch.

A van with British Columbia licence plates pulls up on the street. Seven passengers get out, led by a guy with spiked orange hair and a nose ring. The group appears to pose for a moment, clustered at the outside entry of the boutique. Then all seven of them…three young guys, two women and two men somewhat older march in to find an open table across from Pete, Nick and Jeepers.

“You in town for the funeral?” Nick asks.

“Yes,” one of the older men says. “For coffee, we help ourselves?”

“Cups and the urns are right there on the shelf,” Nick says. “Darlene will take your money when she gets around to it.”

The Duncan community has done
its utmost to comfort Esther, but it is uncomfortable with how to relate to these people from Vancouver. Esther had asked Mac whether she should have the funeral in the United Church, Pastor Eddy’s Community Church or the village hall, or whether she should have just left it in the hands of Cameron’s friends in Vancouver to have his funeral out there?

Mac asked her what Cameron had wanted. She said that Cameron didn’t want his funeral to be in a church, but that he wanted his ashes to be buried in the Rawling plot at the Duncan cemetery.

“If that’s what he wanted,” Mac said, “that’s what he should get. And have the funeral in the hall.”

“I’ll ask Pastor Eddy,” Esther said. “I want Cameron’s funeral done properly.”

She knew he was busy with the election, but she also knew that he would always put matters of faith before politics. He had visited her even before the election was called to give her what comfort he could with her sorrows, and then, when Cameron died, he said that he would conduct the service if she wanted him to. He said that he had no problems at all doing a non-denominational service. Esther was so relieved. Pastor Eddy is a Duncan person. He knows the people, not like the United Church minister, who is a city woman living in Bad Hills.

Chairs sit out on the hall floor. At the back of the hall, ladies bring chocolate squares and set them on the tables. The maplewood box containing Cameron’s ashes rests on a table just inside the entry, on a table covered with Esther’s Wedding Ring quilt, along with a photograph of Cameron in his cap and gown, a toy fire truck that Esther found in a box in the attic and a depression-glass candy dish filled with marbles.

People enter the hall. Sid Rigley hands them funeral cards, and Mac sits at the Wedding Ring quilt table where everyone signs the funeral book. Each person stands a moment to look at Cameron’s picture before taking a seat in the hall. Angela pushes her mother in the wheelchair, and she too, pauses, then sets something down on the quilt, a dream catcher.

Pastor Eddy’s sermon is not a long one. He speaks of mercy and the promise of eternal life in heaven. He says that all are sinners and that only through God’s loving grace can one be saved. He says to pray for grace, and then he says that Mac will come up to give the eulogy.

There’s no avoiding this. It has haunted Mac from the moment he told Esther that he’d do it, and to make matters worse he has come up with a hare-brained idea for a speech that is not at all in character with a community funeral, let alone his own character. But he knows as well that Cameron wasn’t in keeping, so Mac has just got to carry this thing through. He walks up to the front with the Steinbeck book in his hand.

“We mourn the death of Cameron Rawling,” Mac says. “And we mourn together with his mother, Esther.”

Mac knows what everybody’s thinking, and he has pondered long and hard on this speech.

“Cameron has been away from us for a long time, and I knew him only as a youth. I coached him in minor baseball and hockey. He was at the top of his high-school graduating class and went on to achieve a higher education than anybody else I know who came from Duncan. Cameron lived his life, and he died, as all of us do, one way or the other.

“I’m not well versed enough to quote scripture like a preacher can, but I did read a book that tells the Cain and Abel story. Seeing that we’re having this funeral in a hall and not a church, and seeing that I’m no preacher anyways, I’m taking my idea from this book that I got from Esther,
East of Eden.
The main character seemed to have a soft spot in his heart for Cain, and he thought this slayer of his brother had been dealt a raw deal. Cain killed his brother because the Lord accepted Abel’s gift of livestock, but rejected Cain’s gift of grain. And the Lord punished Cain.”

Mac reads from Esther’s book:

“And Cain said unto the Lord, ‘My punishment is more

than I can bear. Behold, thou has driven me out this