THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  He fumbled about in the back until he found the shape of the shovel under the whiteness. Sam was thinking like a criminal now. There was still time to get the truck back before Marty missed it, if he could just get the snow shifted, and if, please God, the battery wasn’t flat. He opened the door, the shovel in his other hand, and from outside the cab turned the key. A churning cough. Again. Two churning coughs.

  “Come on. Come on, you bastard.”

  Two, three, four coughs and a result. He leaned his head against the door with relief. Yes, a criminal now, without a crime. What was he so desperate to get away from? He hadn’t even left the truck, for God’s sake. But he knew the whole scheme had been crazy, and would look crazy to anyone who knew he was here. Nothing he was doing made sense anymore. He wanted to get home, erase the night’s lunacy and make a space to think.

  He dug frantically as the truck ticked over to itself, chopping a rectangular escape route at the front and clearing miniature runways behind each wheel to reverse out of trouble.

  It wasn’t hard. He’d gotten out of worse. In under ten minutes he was snaking his way back down the trail toward town, the snow already filling in and healing the vandalism he’d performed on its perfect undulating coat.

  It was five after three when he got to Marty’s place and parked the truck right where it had been. Not that it mattered. The relentless snow had done a lot of work for him, and it would be a first if someone like Marty, who had trouble remembering his name, noticed the pickup was three inches away from where he left it last night. He waited breathlessly to see if the truck’s return would make those dark windows above the porch roof light up into yellow squares of inquiry. When it didn’t, he pocketed the keys, closed the door as silently as a thief and headed back home.

  The Hunt house was still and dark as Sam retraced his steps to the kitchen door. He bent down in the dark by Bart’s kennel, fumbling for the invisible dog to stroke, hoping to comfort himself with the warmth he stored concealed under his snow-dusted fur.

  Bart was gone. Sam crouched, uncertain, by the kennel opening, his eyes adjusting from the lit street to the dark pools of shadow in the yard. There was no way the husky could get out of the yard unless the gate had been left open. But Sam had climbed over the fence and the gate was shut tight. Jesus, Billy would have a fit if he found his dog gone. There was no time to deal with it now. Sam would face it when the sun came up.

  He pushed open the door and stepped into the dark. Sam started to step out of his boots and stopped.

  There was someone else in the room with him. In the dark.

  Sam remained absolutely still, trying to contain his breathing but knowing his entrance must have betrayed him. For a second he felt like screaming, running from the room and far away from the house. God, he was jumpy. His senses were on overload.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  He let out a breath that had been festering in his chest for an age, fumbled for the light switch behind him and threw it on.

  “Katie! Jesus. I nearly died there.”

  She was at the table, her hair mussed from sleep, but her eyes glowed like those of a cornered animal, ready to strike.

  “Katie. For Christ’s sake, what are you doing sitting here in the dark?” He sat down on the chair opposite her with a heavy thud and moved to take her delicate hands, rested on the tabletop like a judge’s. She moved them away. He withdrew his, stung.

  “Katie.”

  “Where have you been, Sam?”

  He looked into that pale, lovely face and felt the spit dry in his mouth. In the back of his mind it was as though a hellish fanfare were sounding. This is it, he thought. The end of all that joy. As the lie formed on his lips, the first lie he had ever uttered to this woman whom he loved beyond measure, he felt the quiet and sickening noise of a door closing on his life.

  Tight small mouth. “Couldn’t sleep. I walked around the block.”

  And it was over. Everything was over. He had lied to her.

  Katie was still looking at him across the table with those hot, hard eyes. Had the door closed for her? Had she read the lie in his eyes?

  “Long walk, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He looked at her, aching to smash whatever it was sitting between them, but knowing that he was its architect. “How long have you been sitting here in the dark?”

  “ ‘Bout an hour.”

  “Bart’s gone from the yard.”

  “He’s in with Billy.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sam. Did you see Billy before your walk?” There was sarcasm in that last word, and sarcasm was not a tool that Katie often used. Certainly never on him.

  “No. Why? Is he OK?”

  Sam’s face was suddenly in that dimension where anxiety can shift a gear to distress with just one word. Katie looked at him for what seemed like a very long time. Sam’s eyes glittered, his own woes temporarily forgotten as he searched her face for a hint of news about his only son.

  Katie put her hand out and took his. “No. He’s fine. Just had a really bad dream.”

  Sam looked down at her hand holding his. She was confusing him. The wall seemed to have crumbled.

  “We’re going to the doctor’s tomorrow, Sam. Together.”

  He nodded and lifted her hand to his lips.

  31

  Alberta 1907

  Siding Twenty-three

  “Take a good look at them, for the love of God!”

  The men, instead, looked back at McEwan impassively. He was angry. But they were frightened, and that was by far the more dangerous and volatile of the two emotions.

  In front of him, thirty-one strong men who had downed their picks to watch what these reeking savages were doing were now waiting for their engineer to tell them that all was well. He was trying his best, attempting like an alchemist of the emotions to turn attack into comfort.

  “Go on. Look. So it is these barbarians and their wild tales that have turned you from men into children, is it? Look at them. Look at them, damn you!”

  They looked out of duty, although the scene was no different from the one that had ceased their toil. In the thick, relentless snow, seven Indians were constructing a small wooden dome from willow saplings and laying out all manner of foolish trinketry that made McEwan despise them more.

  Observed with a cool eye the Indians were a bizarre sight; huge wide-brimmed leather hats and ill-fitting wool coats and vests they had traded from loggers, the material bunched tight around their waists with shiny belts from which hung a variety of knives and pouches. On top of this cacophony of cloth they wrapped highly colored blankets, which fell to their soft hide-bound feet. It enraged McEwan to think that such a band of comical fools could be bringing the most important engineering project of his life to a standstill. He was snorting steam from his nostrils as he gathered himself to address the men again.

  From the back of the huddled group, scattered beneath the shelter of the red cedars as they watched the proceedings, Strachan spoke in a low voice. “And what o’ the minister, Mr. McEwan? Is he tae be told he is a child an’ aw?”

  Angus McEwan winced. To tell the men what he thought of James Henderson and his hysterical tantrums would be to lose their respect. To the Scots, religion trumped authority as paper wraps stone in the child’s game. He would bite his tongue and play this carefully. “The Reverend Henderson has nothing more serious than cabin fever, Strachan. A month of snow like this does not often occur in the parish of Morningside.”

  There were one or two short laughs from those men who knew Edinburgh and understood the jibe at Henderson’s naïveté. McEwan continued, encouraged by the response. “Aye, and it is the same affliction and nothing more that is making you all see and hear what is not there. You must shake yourselves from this indulgence.”

  Strachan was not convinced. “Ah’ve been in snowstorms that wid bury a man in minutes, Mr. McEwan. An’ four of us here have been stuck under a brushwood shelter for nigh on seven w
eeks wi’ the rations doon tae biscuits an’ bacon. If ye’re tellin’ us that we dinnae know cabin fever when we see it then you dinnae know the crew ye’re workin’.”

  McEwan looked around the faces, searching for an ally among the nodding heads. His search was fruitless.

  Strachan hammered home the last nail. “Naebody’s got cabin fever. And naebody’s workin’ till we see what they’re gonnae dae next.”

  McEwan stared him down. “Then you’ll not be wanting work at all when the snow stops long enough to let an engine through and I send for a new crew.”

  A few anxious faces, but not many.

  “Maybe that’s so.”

  Chanting from behind him broke McEwan’s studied glare and made the men resume their wide-eyed vigil.

  The Indians had thrown a sewn buckskin cover over the wooden structure, and the chief was shaking some damnable stick over it as he made incantations. In front of the tent on a small mound of earth was a buffalo skull and what looked like the severed wings of a large bird.

  McEwan ran a hand over his beard, where snowflakes were trying to hide, and looked back at the group of his men. “You forget how long I have endured this wilderness. My tales will match yours and more, Strachan. And I tell you this: if it is not cabin fever, then it is the worst case of men behaving like old women I have ever come across. When you search for work in the cities I would advise you to adopt the former as reason for your dismissal. It is better than the truth.”

  He read their faces, then turned and walked back toward the camp, making a deliberate detour that would take him through the circular site of the peculiar tent.

  McEwan waded through the snow toward the dark figures in their circle of herbs and stones. The Indians took no notice of him, bending slowly and passively to their various tasks like men dreaming.

  When the tall, bearded engineer reached a point about four feet from the edge of the circle, Hunting Wolf broke off his chanting and without looking at McEwan held up a hand in warning to come no farther. Angus McEwan paused. The Indian turned to face him. McEwan looked into the brown, horribly scarred face of this simpleton and weighed the peril. The eyes of his men were burning holes in his back, but the eyes of this Indian were worse. Two black, burnished jewels stared out at him, glittering with a fierce and unexpected intelligence that made McEwan recoil. Something at the base of his spine wanted him to turn and run but he battled with the sensation and faced the savage like a man. His words, though he knew they could not be understood, came from a dry mouth.

  “You are on Canadian-Pacific Railway’s property.”

  The Indian continued to stare.

  Angus McEwan shot a furtive glance back to where the men were gathered, then walked quickly forward into the circle and kicked the skull from its mound. It was heavier than he had anticipated, and the yellowing head seemed to gaze at him through its empty sockets as it toppled and rolled heavily into the snow. It was not the gesture he had hoped for. He had imagined it soaring into the air like a ball, with Indians chasing after it, as his men roared with laughter.

  Instead, there was silence. Seven Indians looked at him through the falling snow with inscrutable black eyes, and thirty-one railroad men watched with their breath drawn to see what would become of their sacrilegious overseer.

  Hunting Wolf raised his hand slowly and McEwan backed off imperceptibly. The Indian moved his fingers together and apart as if his hand was talking and said something low, though it was said in a voice that to McEwan did not sound as if it belonged to the man. It made him more fearful than any shouting. In fact, it made him very fearful indeed.

  The thick, muffled silence of the snow made McEwan’s head beat with the rhythm of his own blood and he stepped back from this madman and his talking hand. The men were beginning to mutter from their shady grandstand beneath the trees, and through his inexplicable fright Angus McEwan realized that he had played a bad hand. Friendless, he turned quickly from Hunting Wolf and steered his awkwardness toward the camp.

  The eyes that followed his progress betrayed a variety of emotions. There was pity and anger, and glinting in one or two were the first signs of malicious delight at his error. But in one pair of very deep and dark eyes, there was naked hatred.

  Angus McEwan, however, saw no one’s eyes as he stumbled through the snow while the Indians at his back destroyed their defiled site and went in search of a new one.

  The boy turned the wood-and-ivory crucifix over in his small brown hands, his fingers gently tracing the relief ivory figure of Christ. It was a curious object but he liked it. The white of the little bone man’s flesh against the dark wood fascinated Walks Alone, which is why he had been sitting on the floor for at least an hour, holding it and stroking the figure.

  At the foot of the flesh-and-blood white man’s bed, his mother, Singing Tree, was squatting, chewing dried meat to soften it and replacing the masticated pieces carefully in her hip pouch. She alternated her gaze, as she performed this ovine task, between her son and the figure of the thin white man lying asleep on the bed, his chest rising and falling beneath the ragged brown blanket.

  Henderson stirred, groaning slightly as he turned in his sleep.

  “Put the totem back, Walks Alone. He will wake soon.”

  He looked up at her with huge black eyes, then past her to the bed as Henderson awoke, brought back to consciousness by Singing Tree’s growl at her son.

  As though pulled by wires, James Henderson sat up from the waist and shrieked. She was at his side with one swift movement, a thin dirty hand on his shoulder.

  “There is nothing to fear. Lie down and know you are safe.”

  Henderson looked at her with wild eyes, then swept the room with his stare like a man expecting attack. He gasped when he saw Walks Alone looking up at him with a furrowed and solemn brow.

  Singing Tree followed his terrified gaze. “That is Walks Alone, our son. He is here also. He has fetched wood for your fire.”

  For a moment Henderson was lost. Where was he? Why was he in bed in the daylight, still partially clothed, with two Indians in his room?

  And then he remembered Alexander. He fell back onto his hard pillow and covered his face with his hands. Dear Jesus, he was sick. Sick and alone. He sobbed beneath his fingers, and Singing Tree threw her son a glance, nodding her head at the water boiling on the stove.

  Walks Alone stood up and went to the task. He pulled his hand into the big sleeve of his wool jacket to protect his fingers from the hot metal and carried the steaming vessel to his mother.

  “Put it there.”

  He laid the dull copper pan on the wooden floor at her feet.

  Singing Tree opened a small leather bag and took crushed green and brown foliage from it, which she scattered on the surface of the water. Instantly, the room was filled with a thick acidic aroma that made Henderson appear from behind his hands, blink and attempt to sit up again in alarm. The small dark woman looked at him with a half smile. “It is for your brow, Henderson. You do not have to drink it.”

  Walks Alone opened his mouth to laugh but he did so without noise. It was a strange sight, this earnest little boy making the motions of mirth with his face, dark eyes crinkled, but his breath coming in short, soundless panting bursts.

  Henderson looked at the couple as though they were his tormentors, not his comforters, as the woman bent to soak a piece of cloth in her pungent brew. “Where Hunting Wolf? Why…?”

  “He is building a sweat lodge. He will call the spirits and the Grandfathers to help him.”

  Henderson closed his eyes and concentrated on fighting the sharp pains of nausea in his stomach, caused only in part by Singing Tree’s aromatic concoction. His confusion was exhausting and he struggled with his eyes closed to bring together the pieces of himself that were scattered and torn.

  Sweet Jesus, was God testing him? Was he being punished?

  The man of reason was calling to him over his abyss of fear and he held a hand out to it.

 
He was suffering from a fever and Hunting Wolf had sent his wife to tend him in that fever. He was not mad. The world was not ending. He sat up and tried to compose his face and recall his grasp of Siouan. “Hunting Wolf?”

  Singing Tree wrung out the cloth and pressed it to his head, forcing him to lie back down. “He is strong. He will win.”

  The boy looked on with eyes like a woodland animal’s.

  To avoid the closeness of Singing Tree’s pretty face, which made the man in the Scottish minister uncomfortable, he turned to the child. “You help your father?”

  The boy looked back silently. Singing Tree answered, “Walks Alone does not speak. Not since…” She broke off, looked at the boy quickly, and then back at her charge. “He is a shaman child. He needs no words.”

  A shaman child. Little wonder that Henderson’s brain was fevered, surrounded as he was by so much primitive fear and superstition. The very air he breathed was charged with it. His resolve must be to avoid its seduction.

  Hunting Wolf’s wife lifted the cloth from his head, pulled back Henderson’s blanket and began to undo his shirt. He grabbed her hand around the wrist with a roughness he had not intended, but she looked at him with barely disguised mirth again. “The balsam must be laid on the skin of the whole body. Is it the cold you fear or your nakedness?”

  Henderson was reddening. But to have her strip him and lay her hands on his body would be an outrage. He loosened his grip on her wrist, and wrestled for vocabulary. “No. You must not,” was all he could manage.

  Singing Tree pulled her hand away, kept her eyes on his florid face and bent to dip her cloth in the steaming water again. “White men are shy like women, are they not?”

  Walks Alone was smiling. She looked once at her son, then again at Henderson, who had curled his body into a defensive arc.

  “The Kinchuinicks believe the heart and the penis to be the sacred parts of a man, Henderson. You should be shamed by neither. We have a saying, that a man gives life with his penis and lives life with the heart.”

  Henderson’s high color had left him, but he was unchanged in his resolve. “I not Kinchuinick.”