Bone Coulee

by Larry Warwaruk

  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.

  Roseanna hopes that Thomas brings beer. She has drunk beer twice before in her life, and both times it made her dizzy, so dizzy that she could not stop laughing, and Stella wouldn’t let her have any more.

  “We built a cabin in the coulee,” Kokum says. “I helped. I was only eight, but I tramped with my bare feet to make plaster.”

  “The ladle story,” Roseanna says. “What about your soup ladle?”

  “Yes,” Kokum says. “That summer in the coulee, Father took me for a walk along the creek bed. Many willows grew along this stream. He showed me a willow sapling no thicker than my little finger, and he tied it in a knot. He said that the willow would grow, and it would have a big lump on it. He said that if I grew up to be a big girl, and if I was then to be married and I would have to boil soup for my husband, he would make a ladle from the tied-up willow, and that is what he did.”

  “The men should be back by now,” Stella says for the second time.

  Stella’s husband, Harry, and his brother, Charlie Daniels, along with Ben Star and Thomas, each have a twelve-pack of Pilsner. They are standing under the hotel’s fire-escape staircase. Charlie’s beer box is open and two-thirds empty.

  “We should buy a treat for Kokum,” Thomas says. “Who wants to go to the store?”

  “You go,” Charlie says. ”She’s your mother.”

  “Wait for me here, then.” Thomas leaves them at the back of the hotel and walks around to the sidewalk under the street lights. He doesn’t have to hide from anybody. Thomas is proud of himself. He hit the home run, and not just any home run, but the game winner. And now he can treat his friends. He’ll buy Oh Henry! chocolate bars for the girls and Kokum, and a Coca-Cola for himself.

  John Minski stands behind his counter. “All out of vanilla extract,” he says.

  “Not looking for vanilla extract.” Thomas points to the chocolate bars. “I want eight Oh Henry!s and a Coca-Cola.”

  John Minski smiles. He likes dealing with Indians. He will even let them charge on their purchases. They’ve always paid their bills, even if he has sometimes waited as long as two years. They don’t forget, and when they get hold of some money and are back in town, they come in to pay up.

  But Thomas doesn’t have to charge. He pays cash up front, and in minutes he’s back with his friends, heading up the back alley that leads from the hotel past the machinery-strewn back lot of Rigley Motors. It’s filled with an assortment of tractors, plows, cultivators, seed drills, hay rakes and, separate from the farm equipment, a neat line of five new Ford cars.

  “But look at that!” Charlie says. “Airplanes!”

  “Salvage airplanes,” Thomas says. “Old Harvards from the training base in Moose Jaw. They make good snowplanes.”

  They continue up the alley all the way to the dance hall. A continuous crowd of people moves in and out of the open front doors. Cars are parked everywhere along both sides of the street in front of the hall, on each side of the hall and in the alley, where car trunks open and shut and bottles rattle.

  “Let’s go in,” Ben says.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Thomas says. “Kokum will be worrying already.”

  “I’m going in,” Ben says. “Here Thomas, take my case of beer with you.”

  “I’d better go with you,” Charlie says. “To keep you out of trouble. And Harry, you tell Nancy that we won’t be long.”

  At the camp, Nancy is the first to ask. “Where are Charlie and Ben?”

  “Ben wanted to see what they do at their dances,” Thomas says. “Charlie went with him to keep him out of trouble.”

  “I wish that I could go to their dance,” Roseanna says.

  By midnight they are still not back. Harry thinks they should go look for them, but Stella doesn’t want her husband to leave.

  “Charlie will be here soon,” Nancy says. “I know. But maybe someone should go and see anyway.”

  “The music has stopped,” Kokum says.

  “They stop for midnight lunch,” Thomas says. “Maybe Ben and Charlie will come now.”

  “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer…, if one of the bottles should happen to fall, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall…”

  Mac sits in the middle of the front seat, jammed in beside broad-shouldered Pete, his bull head out the window sniffing at the air. Sid pokes his head out his side window as if he wants the whole world to hear him sing. Nick sings too, a curly-haired crooner, the only one who can hold the melody.

  Jeepers doesn’t sing. He’s scrunched down in the back, but still able to peer over the front seat with his good eye, as if he’s watching out for danger ahead. Mac doesn’t sing either; he’s thinking about what he’s going to say to the girl. The car stops and Pete’s out the door like a bull out of a gate. He bellows. “Where’s that horny-looking heifer? Hey? Hey?”

  Everyone is out of the car except for Jeepers. Pete’s in the lead, holding on to his quart sealer.

  “Some homebrew for your women? Hey? Hey?”

  The Indians draw back into the shadows. Mac looks over the fire, trying to pick out the girl.

  “Girls want to come for a ride?” Pete says.

  “Get the hell out of here!” a voice says. It could be the Indian who hit the home run. Mac can make out his face in the firelight. The broken tooth.

  “Trade for homebrew? Hey? Hey? Like I said, the heifer, or the older one.”

  “You’re talking about my wife,” another voice says.

  “She’ll do,” Pete says, but then yells, “Hey!”

  Mac turns around to see an Indian with a knife in front of the car. He stalks Pete, backing him up against a wagon loaded with fence pickets.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Jeepers yells from the back seat of the car. Both Sid and Nick climb in. A knife slashes Pete’s hand as he turns to grab a willow picket from the wagon. Mac grabs a picket and skirts around to the other side. It’s there he sees her, the girl. She holds her kewpie doll up in front of her eyes. They are face to face.

  “Leave my sister alone!”

  It’s the ballplayer, and he wields an axe above his head like he’s waiting for a home-run pitch. Mac swings down with his picket, striking him on his shoulder. The next instant, Pete comes from behind and strikes the Indian on the top of his head. Mac hears the crunching sound.

  He slumps, but stays on his feet, staggering off in the direction of the campfire, only to collapse on it. An old Indian woman rushes in to pull the body from the fire, and she pats at sparks smouldering on the flannel shirt. Mac can smell the burning cloth.

  Jeepers yells again, “Let’s get the hell out
of here.” The car horn honks.

  “Get in!” Nick shouts. Both Mac and Pete drop their pickets, the blood dripping from Pete’s hand. They scurry into the car. For a moment, the tires spin in the loose dirt. Then the car lurches forward and it’s gone from the camp.

  • Chapter 2 •

  The least Roseanna can do is visit her brother Thomas’s grave. It seems that is all she has ever done for him, year after year. She’s an old lady already, and nothing has been done. But now that she has a daughter grown-up and educated, they can plan something together.

  “Fifty-seven years since Thomas died.” Roseanna gasps for breath. She tugs at Angela’s sleeve, sits down on the seat of her walker and takes two puffs on her inhaler. They are stopped halfway up the hill to the cemetery.

  Roseanna sorts through her jumbled thoughts, trying to remember the long-ago night…the dance music, Kokum’s stories at the campfire, the car lights…. The next morning she chopped up her kewpie doll with Thomas’s axe.

  Her brother Thomas had been her only solace at the residential school. Going back there in the fall had been like going to hell, she was so lonely. Only after, in Regina, had she learned to use alcohol for her loneliness, and to let any man use her...red man, or white man, it didn’t matter. He could shove her down in the back seat of his car, and she might as well have been split in half like her kewpie doll. Some time in the middle of the mess of those years of her life, she had given birth to a son. If it hadn’t been for Kokum to raise him, who knows what would have happened to her Glen. And only much later came Angela. How this baby survived her birth, healthy and without mental impairments stemming from an alcohol-soaked mother, had to be a miracle. Roseanna had thought she was already too old to have babies, so when Angela was born she took it as a message from the Great Spirit to clean up what was left of her life and do whatever she could to make a decent life for her daughter. And now she is so proud of her Angela; how her daughter can walk so straight and tall and look at other people face to face. Fifty-seven years ago Roseanna had stared at her feet, as if hiding her eyes would keep white people away from the secret wishes that they might laugh at.

  “Ready to try and walk some more?” Angela asks.

  “A hard climb. It didn’t used to be a hard climb.”

  “Kokum’s funeral was a few years ago,” Angela says. “You didn’t need a walker then, or an inhaler.”

  Roseanna wants to see the new marker that Glen has placed on her brother Thomas’s grave. In those years there wasn’t money to mark graves, but it is different now, and was different even when Kokum died. Angela was already going to high school when Kokum died. Her funeral was a big celebration. Kokum lived to be a hundred.

  Angela follows behind, her hands on her mother’s hips in case she tips over.

  “Was Uncle Thomas’s wake the same as Kokum’s?” Angela asks. Her mother breaks into a cough, and Angela has to sit her down on the walker.

  “Do you need your inhaler?”

  “Too many puffs, no good,” Roseanna gasps. “The doctor said. I’ll just rest here awhile.”

  The climb is really not that steep, and not that far. It’s more of a ceremonial final walkway at funerals, from the road to the grave-sites, but it’s a chore now for Roseanna. She waits to talk as her breathing steadies, for there is much to tell Angela, and not much time to do it. Not much time until Roseanna herself will be carried up this path.

  “At Thomas’s funeral, there was no new band hall, like there is now, but still we held wake to honour his spirit. Always that has been done, no matter how poor our people. Yet even after all these years, can his spirit journey ever be over until something is done to those murderers? The Elders said that revenge would only slow his journey to the spirit world. But some say now that lawyers paid those Elders to say nothing.”

  “Has Glen done anything?”

  “Glen is too busy with the land claims.”

  “He knows what happened with Uncle Thomas?”

  “I don’t know what Kokum told him. I haven’t told him. Our people carry so much shame, as if we are somehow to blame for Thomas’s death.” Roseanna pushes down on the handles of her walker and rises to her feet. “I want to see his grave.”

  First they find Kokum Anne-Marie’s grave. Angela deposits shreds of tobacco near the marker, and she chants a prayer in Cree. She does the same at the new marker for Thomas.

  “They taught you this at the university?” Roseanna asks.

  “An Elder came to our class. He showed us many of our traditions.”

  “I just want to sit here, Angela. You probably know more than I do. Remember Kokum’s funeral?”

  “Yes,” Angela says.

  People came from many reserves, and from Regina. For two days after Christmas people kept arriving for the wake. In the new Three Crows Band Hall, Glen sat the first night with Kokum’s body. Glen was more like Kokum’s own son than he was Roseanna’s.

  By the time Angela started school, Glen was already an adult. He married a white woman, Charlotte. They met at the Regina Agribition Rodeo. He was a bull rider and she was a barrel racer. Glen became a band councillor at Three Crows, and Charlotte a school teacher. They have a son and daughter, Tommy and River.

  The next day of the wake, Glen battled a snowstorm on the way to Regina, and it was evening by the time he got back with Roseanna and Angela. Outside the hall, little Tommy was helping the older boys feed a bonfire. Inside the hall, children were dashing about, and the adults sat in a large circle of chairs. In the centre was the coffin with Kokum’s body. People were still arriving the second day, coming into the hall, then going out to somebody’s house, and then back again to the circle of chairs.

  “Where you been? How was it driving through the snow? Did Santa Claus come to your house?” They shared memories. Could there ever be an Elder as worthy as Kokum?

  Chairs were rearranged around tables. Ben Star stood by the coffin. He flicked a lighter and lit a braid of sweetgrass, chanted a prayer in Cree, and then he spoke in both Cree and English.

  “She was Kokum. Always she had an Oh Henry! chocolate bar for me. She taught us children what was good, and what was bad. That was a long time ago….”

  Ben Star waved his arms in the sweetgrass smoke, chanted another prayer and spoke some more. Several others spoke; younger people who had known Kokum Anne-Marie only in her eighties and nineties. They smudged in the sweetgrass smoke, then said their good things: “She never complained of her stiff and bent-over back. She told the old stories. She made the best hamburger soup.” Some older people nodded, and others smiled and quietly laughed.

  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!”

  “Ther
e 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.”