Bone Coulee

by Larry Warwaruk

  For our children; Stephen, Yuri, Charles, Lara, Nadia, Jari, Natasha, Andrei, Varina, Lorena, and Julia, who face the future.

  In foreign lands live foreign folks

  Their ways are not your way…

  From the Taras Shevchenko poem, “A Reflection”

  • Chapter 1•

  Major Midway Featured

  The Casey Shows are coming this way again. The popular Manitoba midway will be on the grounds at the Duncan Sports day Saturday, June 24. A company spokesman informed the Eagle that first-class baseball and harness racing draw crowds far in excess of what one might expect for a Prairie village, thus making Duncan one of Casey Shows’ few stops in their annual summer incursion into Saskatchewan.

  (The Bad Hills Eagle, June 19, 1950)

  The day before sports day, Mac Chorniak plays pool with his friends. His closest is Abner Holt, a farm boy who’s all arms and legs, and political opinion. Fellow Ukrainian farm boy Jeepers Petruska is short and fat, with cheeks like a pocket gopher, and he’s got a blind eye. Pete Scarf is built like a rodeo bull…thick neck, shoulders bulging…and he’s just as mean. Nick Belak’s a town boy. He’s a joker, and he’s handsome with his long and curly black hair. Last, but not least in the pecking order, is another town boy, Sid Rigley. These six make up the majority of Duncan’s baseball team.

  Mac should be out at the farm putting up hay, but his father says it has to cure first. He chalks his cue as he looks out across the street to the grain elevators. The quota opens Monday, and he’ll be hauling wheat. His father says that Mac can have the money to buy a tractor, a John Deere D from Rigley Motors. That may seem a bit generous, but his father knows that if you want to farm you have to keep up with the times. Farming with horses was good for him, but for his son’s generation it will be tractors.

  An Indian passes by the pool hall windows, driving a one-horse wagon loaded up with pickets. Mac should go out and have a look. Call his father out of the beer parlour. He wonders how long the Indian’s pickets would last before they’d rot. Maybe his father could buy some. They could use them on a new fence at the coulee pasture. Hire the Indians to do the fencing.

  “Quit gawking, Chorniak!” Abner says. He taps the end of his cue on the table, the blue chalk on the cue’s tip making a mark on the green felt. He taps near the shooter, then again, near the seven ball. “It’s your shot.”

  “Hey guys!” Mac says, looking up the street. “The midway’s here. The trucks are turning at the bank. No one must have warned them. That street’s got no bottom.”

  “Did you come to play pea pool?” Abner asks. “Or gaze out the window? Take the seven ball. I think that’s Belak’s.”

  “Because that’s your three ball by the corner pocket?” Nick says.

  “Hey?” Pete says. “Hey? Hey? That’s your seven, Nick? Hey?”

  “Just let him shoot, Bullfrog,” Nick says.

  The arrival of the midway the day before sports day has always been a big event in Duncan. The trucks always pull in the day before, and their setting up in the evening is almost as much of an attraction as the main event. The same can be said for the week-long arrivals of the racehorses.

  “Gonna peel spuds tonight?” Sid asks Nick. Other years Nick peeled potatoes for the Casey Shows concession and got free tickets for all the rides. Any money he’s got, he’s had to earn doing odd jobs around town, or else win it off the farm boys at pool. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of change.

  “Looks like I don’t have to peel spuds,” he says.

  “Why do you have all the luck?” Jeepers says. “Why not me?” And really, why not? Jeepers has had more than his share of bad luck. On his tenth birthday they played war in the hayloft, and a stone from Pete’s slingshot blinded his left eye. His mother blamed herself for allowing Jeepers to have a birthday party in the first place. “Only English have birthday parties for kids,” she said.

  “My turn,” Nick says, after Mac misses on the seven ball. He chalks his cue, then combs his fingers through the curls of his hair, leaving a streak of blue chalk. He sinks the eight ball and, with backspin on the shooter, he’s lined up for the seven.

  “Pay up twice,” Nick says, as he sinks his cash ball in the corner.

  Earlier in the week, Mac hauled in twenty bushels of oats to the horse barns, and Jeepers brought in a load of hay. Mac’s father donated the oats, and Jeepers’ father the hay, making up for his loss by selling homebrew to the horsemen who, with a week’s free board and room for their horses, know a good deal when they see it.

  “All I do is pay up,” Jeepers says, wiping his blind eye with the back of his hand before he tosses two nickels that roll across the table.

  The back door of the pool hall opens, and Sid’s dad pokes his head in. “One of the midway trucks is stuck up by the lumberyard. You boys come help!”

  People gather on the sidewalk, and the horsemen watch from the barns. The truck’s mired in up to its axles, but help’s coming with the putt putt putt of a tractor.

  It’s not the one that Mac has had his eye on. Instead, he’s at the wheel of an old clunker with steel lugs, all the better for traction in this quagmire.

  Sid and Jeepers stand on the hitch giving Mac directions, as if he doesn’t know the way up the alley from Rigley Motors to the Security Lumberyard. When they get to the front of the truck, Nick and Abner have already dug the mud out from under the cab, and Pete’s crawled under to wrap a chain around the axle. Sid’s dad hooks the other end of the chain to the tractor hitch.

  “Give her now,” he says. “And get off that hitch, Petrushka! Get out of the way!”

  Putt…putt. Putt putt putt. Putt putt. Putt putt putt. Putt…. Putt…. The steel wheels turn and turn, but they only sink, and the tractor goes nowhere. Mac shifts into reverse and the wheels turn the other way, flinging lumps of mud. But still the tractor doesn’t move. The Indian with the load of pickets is off by the curling rink sitting on his wagon, smoking a pipe and watching. He gets off the wagon and walks over to the truck driver. They converse, and the driver nods, then gets out of the cab and talks to Sid’s dad.

  “Get some of those pickets!” Sid’s dad says, and the boys grab them from the wagon and jam as many as will fit in front of the tractor wheels. Then they lay pickets out in front of the tractor, halfway to the horse barns.

  “Try it now,” he says.

  Putt…putt. Putt putt putt putt. Putt putt putt putt putt…. The tractor lurches up and forward, like a bucking bull. Its steel lugs grab at pickets, scraping and tearing…, groping forward. Abner jumps up on the hitch, as if the little weight that he can add will help the traction. He swings his right arm around and around in a circle, as if that will help the wheels turn. The truck sucks loose and jumps forward, then lumbers ahead, slow but steady, obedient to the pull of the tractor. The other trucks have backed up to the Toronto-Dominion Bank and have gone up the street in front of the pool hall to the hotel corner, turning there instead towards the town hall and the fairgrounds.

  By eight-thirty in the evening the midway is in operation. The walkway between the green canvas cubicles is filling with onlookers, including Mac and his friends. He notices a group of Indians standing off to the side by the Gypsy woman fortune teller. They must be from the bunch camped out in the bluffs just east of the grounds past the racetrack.

  “Hey!” Pete says. “Get a look at that little pretty one.”

  “Shhh,” Jeepers says.

  “No harm looking,” Pete says.

  “And get us all in trouble? Jeepers!”

  “Leave it alone,” Nick says. “Both of you. Just off the farm,” he tells the Indians.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Jeepers says.

  A barker tosses three balls into a
wicker basket, one after the other as easy as pie.

  “Nothing to it,” he says. “Try your luck?”

  Jeepers buys a ticket. The distance to the basket is no more than the width of his dad’s hayrack. He bends forward as far as he can, head partly turned to see better with his good eye, and he loops the ball, tossing it underhand. It lands in the basket and stays. The same goes for the second throw, but the third somehow magically bounces out. Even if he’s got only one good eye, the fault’s not with his sight. The ball landed in the basket; it just didn’t stay in.

  “Just my luck,” Jeepers says.

  Abner tries. With his long reach it shouldn’t be a problem. He tosses one ball, and it lands and stays. Then he hesitates to consider his second throw, as if there is anything much to consider. The second ball lands in the basket, and Abner screws up his face, nods to indicate that his contemplation paid off, and then turns to the Bickley sisters and smiles. On his final toss, when the ball leaves his hand his fingers stay extended, pointing to the basket as if demanding justice.

  “You just won a kewpie doll!” the barker says. “Which of these pretty girls are you going to give it to?”

  Both girls blush.

  “One of you can have this,” Abner says, and he hands the doll to Esther.

  “Oh,” Jen says, her eyes first on the doll and then on Abner. He shuffles his feet, and it’s his turn to blush.

  “Oh, oh…. Better you…. You can have the doll, Jen.”

  She grins. The girls are twins, both with auburn hair styled like Veronica Lake, curled down over one eye, but Jen’s hair is more in place, and her smile seems to wrap Abner up in a parcel all for herself.

  “We’ll flip a coin,” she says.

  “A dime do?” Nick says, jumping into the discussion.

  “No, no…,” Jen says. “We’ll wait till we get home. Esther and I can sort it out at home. Can’t we, Esther?”

  “Whatever you say, Jen. You seem to have a way with dolls,” and she smirks at Abner, who blushes again.

  The crown and anchor wheel turns with the click click of its stiff leather strap rapping on nails. The games are in one green canvas enclosure after another. In others they’re selling food. Mac can smell the tangy sweetness of pink candy floss spinning in its glass case and the tart scent of vinegar and french fries.

  Jeepers tries and fails to scoop up a watch with the digger in a glass case. Its jaws clutch the watch from its bed of nickels, dimes, quarters, and a few fifty-cent pieces. Some of the coins rise partway, then fall through the opening jaws, along with the watch.

  Sid pays a quarter for ten steel rings. A low table is covered with green cloth. On it are at least a hundred or more coins, with a silver dollar on each corner and one in the middle. The attendant demonstrates how a dollar just fits inside a ring’s circumference. Sid tosses all ten rings, quickly, one after another. He manages to circle one dime, a shiny new 1950 American dime.

  “This looks easy,” Nick says. “Who can’t knock over three milk bottles?”

  “Of course it’s easy,” the barker says. “Watch me.” He throws a baseball at the aluminium bottles that are stacked one on two. They all fall down.

  “I’ll try it,” Pete says, pushing himself forward.

  The Bickley twins stand in close, and at a distance behind them are the Indians.

  “Aim good,” Jeepers says. “You have to hit them to make them fall.”

  “Really?”

  “I mean hit them hard.”

  Pete buys a ticket and throws three balls. One bottle remains standing.

  “It’s rigged,” Pete says.

  “You’re the baseball pitcher,” Abner tells Mac. “You try.”

  It seems easy, but it’s not. Mac figures that one of the bottles is weighted at the bottom. When the barker knocks them down, he has the weighted bottle on top of the other two. For everyone else, the weighted one is one of the bottom bottles. Mac will have to strike it right at the base.

  On the first pitch he hits the stack dead centre, but one bottle remains upright. With his second throw, he hits again. The stubborn bottle rocks back and forth but doesn’t fall. Mac rubs the third and last baseball into the palms of his hands, more out of nervousness than out of any particular throwing strategy. He does the same thing on the pitcher’s mound, where it’s more to get the proper grip for a curveball. He notices the pretty Indian girl still standing beside the fortune teller’s tent, and she notices him. Mac catches this, and she quickly lowers her eyes.

  Straight overhand he throws. The ball strikes the turf and the bottle, flipping the bottle up off the ground; it falls on its side.

  “A winner!” the barker shouts. “Pick out your doll!”

  What can Mac do with a kewpie doll? Another doll for the Bickley twins and they won’t have to fight over them. He’s about to pick one out for Esther, but he looks over her shoulder and sees the Indian girl again. The others Indians are leaving, but she stays where she is.

  “Which one do you want?” the barker asks.

  “Give me a minute,” Mac says. There are blonde dolls and redheads, but he chooses a dark-skinned, black-haired Hawaiian doll and takes it to the girl.

  “What’s he doing?” Jeepers whispers.

  “Excuse me,” Mac says to the girl. “This is nothing I could use. Would you like to have it?” She glances up, and for another fleeting moment their eyes meet. Without a word, she takes the doll. Her hands bob the doll up and down for a moment or two, and then she runs to join the others.

  For the rest of the evening the girl’s image stays with Mac. What would people say if he went to the Indian camp to ask her if he could take her to the sports day dance? Would she come? And does he have enough nerve? He doesn’t. Sober, he doesn’t.

  Mac waits for his father to come out of the beer parlour, which won’t happen until it closes for the night. He kills time in the pool hall, watching the old-timers play blueball. Every time someone sinks the blue ball, everybody else doles out a nickel. He’s tempted to join in, but he knows that he’s not in their league. Around ten-thirty, he walks back out to the fairgrounds.

  The midway is silent and still, but for the muffled sounds of stragglers leaving the grounds and the bedtime murmurings of the midway people settling in for the night. Mac walks alone on the vacant track. It’s a night of the full moon, and he can clearly see the outline of the midway on the west horizon, and the aspen bluffs of the Indian camp on the east.

  It’s a warm June night, the air filled with the scent of prairie roses, racehorses and the wood smoke of the camp. He has heard that an Indian camp never sleeps. Is the girl awake? He can’t just walk through the trees into the camp, but he wishes he could. What did he see in her eyes? What was she thinking?

  He walks around the racetrack three times, hoping that she might somehow appear from out of the bushes and notice him. What would he do if she did? He could ask for her name. Ask if she likes the kewpie doll. But she doesn’t appear, and it’s time to take his father home. He’ll want Mac to drive the car.

  Mac pitches the final game in the Duncan Sports Day tournament. He did the first game in the morning, and Sid pitched the semifinal at two o’clock. Mac’s now working the ninth inning of the final.

  Smack! His rising fastball is right on the mitt.

  “Strike one!”

  “Hey, Mac! Once more, big guy! Big left-hander! Big Uke!” Abner calls for a sinking curve. They’re one run up and working on the last out, an Indian the Mainline Rockets picked up for the tournament.

  Mac has been pitching senior ball for three years. They are a young team, half of them farm boys from the Buffalo Hollow School District. Their coach, Herman Scarf, Pete’s father, is a son of homesteaders who brought the game of baseball up with them from the States.

  Mac takes off his cap and wipes his brow, takes his glove off and with both hands rubs the baseball. He steps up to the mound, then steps off and feigns a throw to first, checking the runner. Steppin
g up on the mound again, his back foot on the rubber, he eyes first base a second time, then winds and pitches home, not to Abner’s mitt but at the batter’s head. The Indian falls back, the ball breaks and drops but across the centre of the plate.

  “Strike two!”

  The Indian steps out of the box and with the end of his bat taps out the dirt caked in his spikes. He turns to the umpire and gives him a broken-toothed grin.

  Mac sets up again, same routine. Fingers across his wet forehead. Same wet fingers rubbing the baseball. Same two-finger call from Abner for the curveball. In set position, Mac checks the runner a third time, then throws his sinker, right to the batter’s head. But this time the ball doesn’t break, and only the Indian’s sudden reflex to hit the dirt saves him from getting beaned.

  “Ball one!”

  Abner motions to the umpire for a time out. A strap on his left shin guard has come undone. He checks all the snaps, stretching time to give Mac a breather. Pete’s dad has coached them well. Create moments like this to rest the pitcher, break the batter’s rhythm. Herman’s coached the boys a long time. When they were kids he’d come to the Buffalo Hollow School and tell the teacher he’d take the afternoon to give the kids some physical education. It didn’t matter if some of the students were girls. They’d all get their share of pop flies.

  Now the boys are one fine senior team; men in their late teens and early twenties, four of them under seventeen and still going to high school in Duncan. Mac is eighteen. Abner, nineteen. One-eyed Jeepers in right field, eighteen. Pete in left, twenty. Nick on second, eighteen. Sid, twenty-one, and the oldest guy on the team…

  “Ball two!” Again, right at his head, for the second time forcing the batter to hit the dirt. He shakes himself off and stands back in the box waving his bat slowly back and forth above his head. He doesn’t grin.

  Abner calls for a new ball from the ump, and he rubs it in the dirt, then works it round and round in the pocket of his catcher’s mitt. Then he calls for a time out again. He unfastens the snap on his chest protector, then re-fastens it. Taps his face mask on home plate as if to shake out dust that might be clogged in the sweat soaked into the mask’s leather pads. He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the pads. Finally he walks over to the players’ bench, says something to Herman and digs into the equipment bag for his other mask.