Bone Coulee (3 page)

Mac’s father dumps the water and what’s left of the ice. “You boys should maybe stay away from that homebrew stuff,” he says. “You have to know how to drink it. Otherwise, you are asking for trouble. And don’t forget, Mac. You have chores in the morning.”

Mac knows that is good advice. He also knows what it means to drown your sorrows. He feels
down,
not so much because of a lost ball game; maybe it’s just the humidity. Maybe it’s the girl.

He’s still thinking about her when he and Sid walk into Minski’s Store with the five dollars they collected in Nick’s cap.

“Be with you in a minute,” a voice calls out from behind an island counter piled with men’s striped-denim coveralls, towels and blankets. John Minski steps up on a footstool and winds the Salada Tea clock that hangs on the wall. He steps down the same time that the clock hammers down,
“Dong! Dong!”
nine times.

“What can I do for you boys?”

“Ahh…” Sid looks at Mac, as if he’s stuck for what to say and needs some help. His father and John Minski are both on the village council. Sid’s father is the mayor.

“Do you sell…ahh…can we get some brew?” Mac asks.

The storekeeper studies their faces for a moment or two, and then he shrugs his shoulders.

“How much do you want?”

How much do they want? Mac realizes that they have no idea what the homebrew comes in. Twenty-six ounce whiskey bottles? Beer bottles? Quart sealers? Gallon wine jugs?

“Five dollars worth,” Sid says.

John Minski wipes his hands with a cheesecloth rag that he always keeps handy on the counter. He then walks into a narrow aisle between two high rows of shelves, where he stands on tiptoe to reach a shoebox marked Men’s Brown Oxford, Size 9, and another, Size 10. He returns to the front counter with the two boxes. “Five dollars,” he says, and hands one box to Sid and the other to Mac.

The midway crowd has thinned out.
A few stragglers remain betting at the crown and anchor, but many of the men have strayed to the beer parlour. Uptown, young boys run everywhere, darting between angle-parked cars, throwing firecrackers at girls’ legs.

Women and girls walk the front street from the hotel and beer parlour to Pearson’s Hardware at the end of the block. They browse in Minski’s Store, buy ice cream in Wong’s Café and lick their cones as they turn at the hardware corner to stroll the two blocks of the side street towards the horse barns. They pass by Maw Brown’s boarding house where she stands in her doorway watching the street, and they walk past Smitty’s Shoe Repair all the way to the Security Lumberyard and Hardware. From there they retrace all their steps, only to start out all over again from the hotel. The same happens every Saturday night, but this is an even bigger Saturday night. They walk in the lull of dusk, waiting for the sports day dance.

At the Indian camp, Roseanna Desjarlais, the girl with the kewpie doll, talks to her mother, Anne-Marie.

“The Mainline team gave Thomas twenty dollars,” Roseanna says. Her mother simply nods and continues stirring her soup. Their camp is situated northeast of the fairgrounds, an area of tramped-down grass, surrounded with willow, and aspen bluffs. A trail cuts through the bush from their clearing to the edge of the fairgrounds.

“Thomas gave me this!” Roseanna says, pointing to a fifty-cent piece on the palm of her open hand. “Can I go spend it at the store?”

“A doll yesterday and money today. A spoiled girl.” Anne-Marie adds a handful of oatmeal to thicken her soup, now bubbling in the cast-iron pot. She is fifty-five, a widow, a mother and a grandmother. She is
Kokum
to all the little ones while the adults go to the bushes to cut pickets, or to the farmers’ fields to pick their rocks. The women pick berries. Tonight the men are in town helping Thomas spend his winnings.

“Someone should go with you,” Anne-Marie says. “Maybe Stella will go.”

Stella answers from inside the tent. “I’ll go. As soon as the baby falls asleep.”

“I will look after the baby,” Anne-Marie says. “But have soup before you go. Here, I have some money.” She produces two crumpled dollar bills from within the folds of her dress and hands them to Roseanna to give to Stella. “The soup needs more neck bones. Ask Mr. Minski for a quarter’s worth. And sardines. They are only ten cents, but hurry to get back before dark.”

The girls walk along the backstretch
of the empty track. They can see the swinging chairs of the Ferris wheel, nearly all of them empty. Workers dismantle the merry-go-round. In front of the barns, a man leads a horse up into a closed-in truck box. The big animal’s hooves clunk on the wooden ramp. Racing sulkies are mounted on truck roofs. Three men stand in a barn doorway. They smoke, drink beer and watch Roseanna and Stella walk by.

A man carries a set of snare drums up the steps of the dance hall. Three others follow with musical instruments in black cases. The girls hurry down the two blocks, past Rigley Motors John Deere to the hotel.

They notice Thomas, and Stella’s husband, Harry, standing behind the hotel’s fire-escape staircase. Roseanna wonders where Ben and Charlie are. Ben Star is her brother Thomas’s best friend, and Roseanna thinks he likes her. Maybe they are playing pool. An old-looking white guy wearing a dirty suit jacket with a torn elbow holds out his hand and Thomas gives him money. Stella pokes Roseanna.

“They are buying beer.” The girls watch for another moment, then proceed along the front street to the store.

Kokum said they could buy oranges. The fruit sits piled in bins by the front windows…oranges, grapefruit, lemons…overflowing in the bins, and a banana tree hangs from a hook on the ceiling.

“Oranges?” Mr. Minski says, wiping his hands on his cheesecloth rag, and then he reaches under the counter for a brown paper bag.

“A dozen,” Stella says. “And a quarter’s worth of neck bones. Two cans of sardines.”

The girls examine the open boxes arrayed on a platform shelf. Fig bar cookies are stacked upright in layers divided with wax paper. Chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies. Gingersnaps. Open boxes of cookies are set all along the platform, with a second shelf underneath with boxes of dried apples, dates, raisins and apricots. Against the wall behind the shelves sits a big round of cheddar cheese on a wheel that turns if Mr. Minski cranks a lever. And it has a big cleaver attached to cut the cheese.

“A quarter’s worth of those cookies,” Stella says, pointing to the fig bars.

On the other side of the store are shelves filled with all kinds of clothing and material. The store has towels, flannel sheets, wool blankets, work pants and coveralls, shirts, rolls and rolls of cotton print. In behind these shelves, on the shelves against the wall, are paper boxes filled with panties, brassieres, slips and stockings. Roseanna opens a box of silk scarves. She’d like a purple one to wear around her neck.

“What colour would you like, Stella? We can get three for a dollar. We can buy one for Kokum.”

“The red one,” Stella says. “And a green one for Kokum.”

When the girls leave the store, it’s already getting dark. They proceed up the side of the muddy street, a more quiet route back to the camp…away from the beer parlour…and the dance hall.

Mac finally gets to see the girl again,
but it’s not under the best of circumstances. He’s not so lucky that he might see her when he’s by himself on a moonlit racetrack. Not that he’s drunk; they haven’t opened their sealers of homebrew yet. But they are drinking beer as they cruise the front street in Pete’s car. He turns up the muddy street, spinning his wheels and fishtailing all over the road.

“There they are!” Nick says.

“Hey!” Pete shouts. “Jump in for a ride? Want a beer?” The girls take one look, then take off running up the sidewalk.

If they were the Bickley sisters, they wouldn’t have refused a ride, but the boys wouldn’t be as free with their talk either. They wouldn’t be talking
smoked meat,
and
gangbang.
But the beer, and the thought of Indian girls, gets them talking. It’s all talk anyway. A lot of what they do is just talk.

“Let’s try out that brew,” Nick says.

“Not here,” Sid says. “Bad enough we got beer. With the cops in town we shouldn’t be drinking anything in the car.”

The five ballplayers hide behind the dance hall to sample their homebrew. Sid sniffs the raw aroma.

“Pheww!”

“Let me smell it,” Pete says.

Nick finds a bottle cap on the ground. “Pour a bit in this,” he says. “Light a match to see if it burns. Then we’ll know if it’s safe to drink.”

“It will be good,” Jeepers says.

“Even if does smell like sweat,” Sid says. “Eh?”

“Like a hot woman,” Pete says, and he screws up his face to sniff like a bull at a cow’s ass. “Hey? Hey?”

Mac hears the throbbing beat of the dance band’s bass drum, steady with the yearning call of the saxophone music of
Carolina Moon.
He likes the earthy smell of homebrew, and all the other smells of a warm summer night on the fairgrounds outside the dance hall. The wild roses are in full bloom, and their scent carries in the air, as do the lingering smells of the midway concession and the horses, the perfumes wafting out the screened windows of the dance hall and even the smell of sweat.

He’s back to thinking about the Indian girl. Mac’s not sure who came up with the idea to go to their camp. The topic came up after they had finished the first quart sealer of homebrew. He just remembers that nobody needed any convincing, except perhaps Jeepers. But he’d be even more afraid to hang back in the dark by himself than to throw caution to the wind and join in on the raid.

Roseanna and Stella sit around
the campfire with Kokum,
Anne-Marie and Charlie Daniel’s wife, Nancy. Three camp dogs lie off a distance from the fire’s light. Kokum adds a few sticks to the fire to ensure that the soup stays hot. She has added the neck bones and more potatoes. When the others get back from town they will be hungry.

“Can I see the ladle?” Nancy asks. “It has a story?”

Roseanna draws closer to the fire, and to her mother. She loves to hear Kokum’s stories. Just in the summer she gets to hear them. The rest of the year Roseanna is away at the Residential School, and Kokum says that stories are best to tell in the wintertime. The fire flickers, and Roseanna hears the
hoot, hoot
of an owl. From somewhere high up in the trees, the bird swoops down over the tents and just above their heads where they sit by the fire. Anne-Marie hands the ladle to Stella, who holds it close to the fire to see it clearly. The handle and spoon are all one piece.

“A long time ago,” Kokum says, “When I was eight years old....”
Nancy returns the ladle, and Anne-Marie holds it up to the light of the fire. “Even before that…before I was born. Before my brothers were born, my mother and father fled from this country
to Montana. When the English were hanging Louis Riel.”

Stella nurses her baby, rocking in a slow rhythm, side to side, humming under her breath to the faint music from the dance hall in the distance.

“Mother was Cree,” Kokum says, “but Father was more French
than Indian. He was Métis, and they lived in the winter at Round Prairie between here and Saskatoon…close by the reserve. He would have been fighting at Batoche with the rest of them, had
he and Mother not been visiting relatives in Manitoba. But it didn’t
matter if the Métis were at Batoche or not. The soldiers burned out the homes at Round Prairie anyway.”

Every once in a while Roseanna hears someone shouting and laughing from somewhere among the parked cars around the dance hall. Car horns toot, and she can hear the dance music. She wonders how much fun it must be to dance there. She goes to the tent to get her kewpie doll and quickly returns to the fire and the soft drone of Kokum’s voice.

Father and Mother came back eighteen years later, and there were three of us children by then. This white man’s village was not here yet. No railroad yet, and no grain elevators. Father wanted to go all the way to what might be left of Round Prairie, but Mother had another plan. She said to turn our cart west. We had to make our cart into a raft to float across a river, and once we managed that we soon arrived to look down into a deep coulee. There were many buffalo bones in this coulee, and Father could sell them in Moose Jaw. There were so many bones in the coulee Father thought we could stay there to live, and he and my brothers could make many trips hauling bones.

“Who would want bones?” Roseanna asks.

“Americans,” Kokum says.

“Whatever for?” Stella asks.

“For gunpowder. And Father said that Americans ground up bones to make fertilizer, and even used the bone meal to add to sugar. He said that when he was a boy he saw the prairie covered with bones. American hunters took only the hides. They shot the buffalo, slit the hide down the belly and around the neck. They spiked the buffalo’s nose to the ground, hitched up a horse and pulled the hide off like you’d skin a muskrat.”

“Yuk!” Roseanna says.

“Where are the men?” Stella says. “They should be back by now.”

“They come when they come,” Kokum says.