Bone Coulee (5 page)

A drum beat on and on. Stella, who leaned on a cane, made her way to the coffin. She looked down awhile at Kokum Anne-Marie, and then set a silk scarf alongside the body. Roseanna followed with Angela, whispering to her. “Do you have something? From both of us? Maybe your earrings? They look so nice. Silver eagles.”

“Glen just gave them to me for Christmas.”

“He will understand,” Roseanna said.

People walked four times around the coffin, and then it was slowly carried from the hall. By the bonfire, the bearers lifted the coffin onto the back of a half-ton. The journey wound along the road leading to the cemetery hill. The bearers then took the coffin off the truck and carried Kokum’s body to be buried on top of the hill. Snow fell gently, and beyond the cemetery, high in a tree at the edge of an aspen bluff, a horned owl perched.

“I remember there was an owl hooted when we buried Kokum,” Roseanna says. “I hope it’s not here when you bury me.”

“Don’t say that, Mother.”

Roseanna breaks into another fit of coughing. Angela holds her by the arm and pats her on the back. She searches through her mother’s pockets for the inhaler, but Roseanna finds it herself and shoots the spray into her mouth.

“Maybe this is my last visit here. Or my second last. Next time I visit to stay.”

“Quit talking like that!”

“There are worse places to be than here.”

From the cemetery they can see people’s houses scattered here and there in clearings among the aspen bluffs. The air is a dead calm, but yet up close in an aspen bluff, the leaves tremble. They flutter like wands of feathers on a pow-wow dancer.

“They speak,” Roseanna says.

“Who? What do you hear?”

“The spirits plead with us. The grandmothers and grandfathers. We’ll go there, Angela.”

“Where?”

“To Duncan. We can go there when you start your job at Bad Hills. Rent a cheap house there, and you can drive to work in Bad Hills.” Roseanna stops talking to catch her breath. Her chest heaves, and she coughs some more.

“I was still a teenager when we camped that summer. Younger than you. I should have told you these things before. I saw them kill Thomas, and nobody has paid. Just blood money from crooked lawyers.”

“What can we do?”

“You have a big education, Angela. Bachelor of fine arts. Isn’t that what you call it? None of us had anything like that. What did we know?”

“If we move into a house in Duncan, won’t they be suspicious?”

“In their eyes we are just two more Indians. I look nothing like I did back then. Maybe you are a resemblance of a young me. But that’s all the better. Just enough to make them wonder. Old men might get foolish and slip up if a pretty girl confronts them.”

“You mean I should lure them?”

“Like a worm lures a fish, eh?”

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know. You took an acting class at the university. You can make something up to do.”

“Can we get Glen to help? Didn’t you tell me that he has business in Duncan?”

“With land claims. Negotiating with some of those men. He can’t bring up Thomas’s murder.”

“But you think I can?”

“Not accuse them. They won’t even know who we are. After a while they may start wondering, and then maybe realize…. Maybe then they will confess.”

“You think so. After all this time.”

“So it might take a little more time.”

“Oh.”

Roseanna doesn’t like how Angela says
oh.
She makes it sound as if her mother doesn’t know what she is talking about. Does her daughter even care? She is more interested in her new job. Leave everything to Glen, she thinks. It was Glen who told her about the job. Glen even found out how cheap it was to rent a house in Duncan. He had been to the real-estate office in Bad Hills, and had found out about land available near Duncan. He even saw the coulee place that Kokum used to tell of in her stories. “Good willow there for your baskets,” he told Angela. Glen likes to make fun of her education. He calls it BBW, bachelor of basket weaving. A Dakota artist from Minnesota did come to Regina to teach at the First Nations University. He did show
Angela how to make things with willow. But that is not all she learned. Among other things, she learned smudging, and the many things to know about the Four Directions. Important things Roseanna missed out on wasting her time in residential school.

• Chapter 3 •

M
ac shouldn’t let it bother him; God knows, the
village of Duncan can always use a few more people moving in, even if it’s only a couple of Indian women. It can’t do him any harm, other than stir up a dark memory he’s spent a good part of a lifetime trying to forget. He finds solace in his basement. He retreats there with his book of Taras Shevchenko poems, dusted off from his student days at the Mohyla Institute. Now, in his old age, the poems are taking on meaning that he didn’t have the time for in his youth.

Before his wife Peggy died the rumpus room spelled merriment with its parties on New Year’s Eve; and they watched the Grey Cup on television, having the Holts and Rawlings over to watch it with them. That was all before Peggy’s cancer. When they built the new house, the rumpus room had smelled crisp and clean, not musty.

But an old man like Mac just lets things slide into decay. When Peggy was around the basement walls had no mould. Did she wipe them down with Javex? He never paid attention. It wouldn’t hurt to try Javex. On the bar counter are tomatoes his daughter-in-law brought him from the farm. Some are spoiling. It’s a good thing he didn’t set them out to ripen on the pool table.

Mac sinks down into the orange-and-purple-patterned sofa chair; the one Peggy made him haul down the stairs when they bought the new set on one of her birthdays. He opens his book to the poem,
When I was Thirteen:

…I bowed my head and wept

Such bitter tears…. And then a lass

Who had been sorting hemp

Not far from there, down by the path,

Heard my lament and came

Across the field to comfort me;

She spoke a soothing phrase

And gently dried my weeping eyes

And kissed my tear-wet face…

It was as though the sun had smiled,

As though all things on earth were mine,

My own…the orchards, fields, and groves….

Mac is a collector. When he was a boy he collected birds’ eggs, penny match covers, baseball cards, and he started collecting coins.

“I married a collector of British royalty,” Peggy said with a scowl when she saw his complete set of Queen Victoria Canadian quarters. “Yuk!” his pretty nurse from Dublin said. “You’ve not heard of the Troubles? And the bloody drummin’ Orangemen?”

Mac misses her fire, but more than that; she filled up his life. She made him feel that he was worthwhile. And when he told her about his past (and he had thought long and hard about whether or not he should) she took his hand in both of hers and squeezed, and then she kissed him. She said to get on with life. She said that in Ireland, in the north, there’s not a week goes by that somebody doesn’t get bumped off, but people keep on living all the same. She said that’s what Jesus died on the cross for. He paid for everybody’s mean streak that each one of us has now and then, and in Ireland the men would do themselves good to stay off the liquor, and she kissed him again. Ukrainians too, Mac thinks.

He misses his farming years, the productive time of his tie to the soil. Bone Coulee is Mac’s pride, his Century Farm. He is a third-generation Saskatchewan dirt farmer, a grandson of immigrants. His grandmother brought with her a jar of rich black humus that Ukrainian farmers called
chernozem.
She packed the jar in the trunk her father had made to give her at her wedding. The trunk is still out at the farm, up in the barn loft.

Mac’s grandfather walked many miles probing the ground for
chernozem.
But when he came upon Bone Coulee, and the buffalo bones, he wanted this quarter section. In Moose Jaw he had seen piles of these bones being loaded onto railway cars. Somebody was buying them.

Glass-covered cases of arrowheads hang from his rumpus room walls. In the dirty thirties he walked with his father in blown-out fields to gather arrowheads. Today he finds them along the shores of Lake Diefenbaker and along the dry creek bed of Bone Coulee.

The coulee is a storehouse of artifacts, and Mac heads a committee that raises money to have a cairn built in honour of what the locals call “The Buffalo Bone Trail.” The committee’s mostly himself, his daughter-in-law and Esther Rawling. His friends toss an odd quarter or two into the coffee-row collection can. Through all the years, these old baseball buddies haven’t strayed from Duncan, and Mac sees them every morning.

“Anything more on the cairn project?” Nick asks.

“Cheque in the mail this morning,” Mac says. “Courtesy of Saskatchewan Heritage, along with a thank-you letter to the committee.”

“You might get it erected in time for the fair after all,” Nick says. “An election year does wonders when it comes to dishing out money.”

“No problem getting speakers for the dedication,” Pete says.

The new Duncan café was built with donations of money and labour and leased for a dollar to Kwok Ming and Tung Yee, a couple from Hong Kong. Enlarged photos hang on the wall: pictures of a threshing machine, steam engine, draft horses, wheat
sheaves…taken at last fall’s Heritage Day threshing demonstration.

“More coffee?” Tung Yee flits around the table like a butterfly, coffee pot in one hand, coffee can jangling coins in the other. “Twenty-five cents for refill. All money for donation to Mac’s buffalo trail tower.”

“A plaque, Tung Yee. A stonemason is going to build a cairn, and we’re getting a bronze plaque engraved.”

“Sure, Mac. Twenty-five cents for refill.”

“Here’s for all of them,” Mac says, and he drops a toonie into the can.

“Petrushka!” Nick says. “Get your nose out from behind your newspaper. You can’t see and you can’t hear. Tung Yee’s asking if you want a refill.”

“Look at this,” Jeepers says. “Mac’s name right on the front page!”

“What’s it say?” Sid asks.

“It’s about the all-candidates debate we went to last Tuesday in Bad Hills. NDP John Popoff, and Sask Party Eddy Huff. The reporter interviewed Mac. Don’t you remember?” Jeepers holds the paper up and points to the story.

“
The Eagle
quotes Mac: ‘The debate? Just a lot of hot air. Mostly huffing and puffing.’ That’s exactly what Mac said.”

“Anybody know this John Popoff?” Sid asks.

“Farms in the Dirt Hills south of Fiske,” Pete says. “Organic farmer…grows mostly weeds. And he raises free-range pigs. Last week they were feeding off his neighbour’s chickpeas. I don’t know how he can market those pigs as organic, with all the spraying they do on chickpeas.”

Jeepers rubs his glass eye with the back of his hand. “Ahh,” he mumbles. The eye drips. He’s a squat little man, red faced and stout from eating too many perogies. His eyes bulge and his cheeks wobble as he shakes his head. “Ahh, ahh,” and his head lowers and he bends, as if looking for something under the table, then folds his newspaper to fit in his jacket pocket. He lifts his head and smiles, aware of the attention he’s attracting from the faces around the table.

“You’ll see the NDP candidate when Abner brings him around.”

“There are rumours that Abner sold his land to the Indians,” Sid says. “Heard anything, Mac?”

“Abner did mention something.”

Mac doesn’t say anything more. He’s worried about his own quarter section. His Bone Coulee. He’s kept this piece of land in his own name; it’s the site of the original Chorniak homestead. But it’s not just that. Bone Coulee is a buffalo jump, a slaughtering ground prehistoric Indians used before they had horses to ride to chase the buffalo down. There are tipi rings all over the floor of the coulee. He wants to preserve it himself. The quarter section is his last piece of land, the one fact that still classes him as a farmer, and a holder of a Wheat board permit book.

“You going to sell?” Nick asks.

“And wouldn’t you like to know.”

All Mac has left in his name is fifty acres cultivated and the rest of the quarter section in prairie grass. With some farmland still in his name, he gets the cheaper rates on farm plates for his truck. He took some new swather parts to the farm yesterday, and while he was there he fuelled his truck. His son told him that the government’s changed the rules. He said a farm has to gross $10,000 in order to qualify for tax-exempt gasoline.

“The government doesn’t have to know,” he told Lee.

“How much wheat did I seed at the coulee?” Lee asked. “Fifty acres? You can’t hold a permit book on fifty acres.”

“Fifty, or five thousand,” Mac said. “The Wheat Board represents us all.”

“And that’s the trouble.”

It sure is, Mac thinks. One generation to the next. Men organize to work together and form the wheat pool, and their sons tear it down. The next generation of Indians may as well turn it all back to the buffalo.