“No,” Angela said. “Mr. Chorniak’s going to build a cage for it.”
“In his back yard,” Roseanna said.
“No, I think, here. I brought it here in the first place, so I should look after it. Just until it can fly again.”
“Maybe it can teach you something then; how to hex Chorniak.”
Glen only laughed. He said he would take the dog because he didn’t like to see it tied up, but as for the place to put an owl cage, he’d leave it up to them and Mac Chorniak.
Roseanna adjusts the nozzle of the oxygen tube under her nose, and with a piece of twine ties her walker to the oxygen tank that’s attached to a little cart. What if the other day she’d gone to the café when those people were there? The woman could have interviewed her. Duncan has a much bigger story, Roseanna would have said. Does anybody remember Thomas Desjarlais’s home run? she would have said. I’m his sister, she would have said.
Roseanna clunks up the alley. It would be so much easier if the walker had wheels. She grins. How many centuries did Indians survive without wheels? On one side of her is the Esther woman’s place with the yappy dog. On the other side, Chorniak. His back door opens, and Chorniak himself steps out.
She has the opportunity; he’s coming out with a bag of garbage to put in the can. She can’t look. If only her walker had wheels so she could get on her way faster. He’s watching her; he’s standing there holding his garbage-can lid and watching her. Keep moving, Roseanna, clunk, clunk, clunk.
“You don’t have to pull that rig behind you,” Mac says. “Just lay the tank in your basket under the seat.”
Should she tell him to come and do it then? Roseanna keeps moving. Lift the walker, clunk; lift the walker, clunk.
“Here,” Mac says. “You don’t want to get your feet tangled up in your hoses, or the twine. You could trip.” He unties the twine and removes the tank from its carrier.
“There,” he says as he lays the tank and plastic hose in the basket. “I’ll take the cart and set it in your backyard.”
She nods once, then looks down at the toes of her Nike runners.
“Thank you,” she says, as she lifts her head to fix her gaze straight up the alley. She lifts the walker, clunk. “I have to go. Goodbye.” Clunk. First thing she will tell Angela when she sees her is to go to the health centre in Bad Hills and trade this thing in for one with wheels.
The alley is rutted, and when Roseanna finally gets to the street, she finds that it has been freshly gravelled all the way to the fairgrounds. She remembers the truck stuck in the mud. There is no more lumberyard, and no more mudhole street. In place of the horse barn is a new skating rink, and they have moved the old barn across the fairgrounds, to the aspen bluff where the camp used to be.
She clunks her way to the fairgrounds and finds it easier to walk on the level ground that once was the racetrack. The day of the sports day she smelled horses, and she smelled potato chips frying. At night before the white guys came, she smelled wild roses. She approaches the aspen bluff and, as at the place of Thomas’s grave, the leaves tremble like wands of feathers.
She struggles to get her walker through the trees and into the clearing where the camp was. The slough with the cattails is still there and mushrooms pop out of the ground here and there. She needs to take a piss.
She pulls down on the elastic waist of her sweatpants, and with both hands on the handles of her walker, she squats. As she pees, she notices bits of trash poking up through the leafy ground: the neck of a Coke bottle, rusted sardine cans. She pulls up her pants, then breaks a branch from a tree. She scratches through the dirt to find the two pieces of the doll that she doesn’t remember throwing in the trash heap. The same doll, but in two pieces. The same dark plastic, only stained in its weathering. How is it that she has found the doll? Has the Creator brought her here? And what does the Creator wish her to do with it? Roseanna holds the two pieces together at the waist. When that young ballplayer gave the doll to her it was so beautiful with its dark colour, and she thought that she too might be beautiful.
Roseanna struggles back through the trees to the level ground that once was the racetrack, and continues on to the hall. A tall, stately woman dressed in pleated tan slacks and matching straw hat descends the front steps of the hall and greets Roseanna.
“You must be the artist’s mother. My sister, Esther, is your next-door neighbour, and I’m Jennifer Holt. And pardon me for asking, but I think I’ve seen you before. You didn’t happen to be a delegate at the NDP convention in Regina last fall?”
There is something Roseanna would just love to ask this woman, but she doesn’t dare. She remembers faces. Especially now when the Creator has returned the dark-skinned doll to her, she remembers the girls who got the fair-skinned doll. She remembers the skinny, long-armed ballplayer saying, “You can have the doll, Jen.” This Jennifer Holt is the “Jen”.
“I was at that convention,” Roseanna says.
“Then why don’t you and I just make our way to the café? We can have a cup of tea. Our candidate’s going to give a speech on the front street.”
Nick Belak meets them at the door.
“Careful,” he says to Roseanna. He holds the door open and straightens a fold in the rubber floor mat. Pete, Sid and Jeepers sit at their table watching. Tung Yee leads Roseanna and Jen to the table by the windows. Nick pulls out a chair for each of them, and Tung Yee gently sits Roseanna down.
“Thank you,” Roseanna says. She fumbles with the plastic line leading to her nose.
“You the artist’s mother?” Tung Yee asks.
“She sure is,” Jen says. “And I’ve been telling her how lucky the regional college is to have her daughter for an instructor. I’ve been up at the hall getting things ready for the fair, and Darlene was helping me this morning. She just raves about the art class she’s taking.”
Tung Yee holds up a framed silk embroidery of two exotic birds perched on flowered branches.
“I show her my picture just before you come here. Not half an hour ago she left with Darlene Chorniak. I try to make Chinese art. Your daughter make Indian art.” She laughs nervously, then hurries into the kitchen with her picture and hurries back out with her coffee pot.
“You like some coffee?”
“Tea?” Roseanna asks.
“Oh, yes! Tea for you and Jen. Not like the men, all the time coffee. I bring pot. And no pay. On the house!”
Roseanna knows these men are watching her. She turns her head slowly towards them, and they quickly turn theirs away. She waits a few moments, and then as in a game of cat and mouse she turns again, but this time quickly, as if she has caught them in the act. She’s about to try again when Jen’s husband, Abner, shuffles into the café.
“You gotta see this,” he says. He stops in the middle of the floor, addressing his wife and Roseanna. “Right out front,” he says, bumping into an empty chair. “Green power! Johnny’s car will run off cooking oil right out of Tung Yee and Kwok Ming’s kitchen.”
“Johnny Puff’s back in town,” Nick says.
Blaze-orange NDP signs drape a yellow VW Rabbit parked in the middle of the street.
“Sid should be here,” Nick says. “He could introduce him.”
John Popoff is a short man with a broad chest and belly. He has a certain strut to his walk, with his shoulders back and his arms swinging. A dozen or so hard-core supporters, mostly in their seventies, as well as a young woman campaign manager imported from Regina, have followed him in from Bad Hills. They form the nucleus of a small crowd including Roseanna and Jen starting to gather in front of the café.
Mac watches from inside the cab of his truck. As in every election he can remember, Abner leads the NDP parade into Duncan, not that it’s ever drawn any votes.
“Any car that can run on diesel,” Johnny says, “can run on biodiesel. And do you notice the different smell of the exhaust? A healthy smell? Like I said, just like standing outside a KFC franchise.” The young campaign m
anager hands out pamphlets, giving one to Mac at his open window.
“New truck?” Nick asks.
“You’ve seen it before.”
“Didn’t think of buying one that would burn biodiesel?”
“Kwok Ming would have to fry up a passel of chicken balls to use up enough oil to fuel it.”
“Jeepers takes all the café’s old cooking oil to feed his pigs,” Nick says “and Farm Report claims that biodiesel is propping up grain prices.”
“Recycle! Recycle!” Johnny shouts as he pounds on the roof of his Rabbit. “We’ll instigate a program that will gather up, free of charge, all the used cooking oil from every restaurant in the province, fast food or otherwise.”
The campaign manager taps on a set of bongo drums. “Either Kathy wants me to sing,” Johnny says, “or else she wants to drown out my noise.”
“What about gas engines?” Nick asks.
“We’re entering a new era,” Johnny says. “The oil companies have, to all intents and purposes, become one big monopoly. The strategy for us little guys is to decentralize production. Right here in the village of Duncan, you have a closed-up garage that could be converted into a collection centre and a research laboratory and processing plant of farm biodiesel, and with further research, biogasoline.”
“Rigley Motors rides again,” Pete says.
“I heard that,” Johnny says. “But you know what? We’re doing it in Fiske. A local co-operative, and yes, without any help from Federated. We are processing biodiesel from spoiled canola, and yes, we are converting gas engines and what not.”
“Just like Stalin,” Jeepers whispers in Nick’s ear. “My dad told me that in Russia during the thirties the communists built a factory to make axle grease from grasshoppers. Green power.”
• Chapter 9 •
Mac had noticed Jen Holt befriending the Wilkie woman, and he figured it couldn’t help but be a good thing. If anybody had a finger on the pulse of things, it was Jen, and she’d be the first to know if the woman might be up to no good or if she just seemed such a grouch because of the state of her health. He knocks on the Wilkie door at a quarter to eight, then wonders if he might be early and they won’t yet be out of bed. He waits a moment, then thinks he should leave and come back later. As a parting gesture he tries the knob, only to discover that the door’s not locked. He opens it partway, enough to get his head in and see Roseanna standing at the kitchen entry, leaning on a cane.
“Who is it?” he hears Angela call from another room.
“Chorniak,” Roseanna says.
“Tell him to come in.”
“Why?” Roseanna asks.
“I brought the owl,” Mac says.
“Hmmmph,” Roseanna says as she turns her back to him and shuffles past Angela, brushing her hair at a hallway mirror.
“He brought the owl,” Roseanna says, and then she lowers her head and mumbles, “Kokum used to say that owls are death birds. She told us that an owl flew over the camp the night those men killed Thomas. I think I remember seeing it, and Kokum said.”
“Maybe I should come back later,” Mac says, thinking that he’s being ignored, that he’s not welcome.
“I’ll be right with you,” Angela says. “Coffee’s on.”
Mac has the owl in Esther’s dog crate in the back of his truck, along with the roll of chicken wire, hammer and nails, staple gun and staples, a five-gallon pail filled with rocks, a crowbar, an electric power auger, an extension cord, some boards he had stored away up in his garage and the used fence posts.
“Where do you want the cage?”
“Anyplace where dogs and cats can’t get it.” Angela pours two cups of coffee, then looks out to see Mac’s truck backed into the yard.
“I thought I would build it around your maple tree. That way the bird could feel right at home. Abner’s coming over to help me.”
“Let’s have our coffee first. Here. Sit down. Do you take sugar and cream?”
“Both,” Mac says.
“Has the owl been eating anything?”
“Pecks away at soup bones, and it just gobbles up raw hamburger.”
Mac would like Esther to see the inside of this house. It might change her opinion on young city people getting away with cheap rent. The table centrepiece is a Nabob coffee can encircled with braided willow and filled with pussy willows. Mac’s mother always had pussy willows. Angela’s mother sits in the living room on a crafted wicker chair. On the wall above the kitchen sink, a dream catcher drapes a framed diploma:
First Nations University of Canada
Angela Marie Wilkie
Bachelor of Fine Arts
“I think your friend is here,” Angela says.
They can both see Abner examining the materials in the truck box.
“We’re in here,” Mac says.
Abner comes into the porch, his arms hanging and shaking like a set of wind chimes.
“Just in time for coffee,” Angela says.
“I gotta tell you what I just heard at the café,” he tells Mac.
“You’d better sit down first. The way you’re shaking you’ll either fall down or kick a hole in the wall.”
“At the café….” Abner grabs onto the tabletop and plunks himself down on a chair. “Your son…. Eddy Huff…. Sid Rigley….” He stops and takes a deep breath.
“Cream and sugar for your coffee?” Angela asks.
“Yes, and, and…, thank you, Ma’am.” He turns again to Mac. “Your son…they’re scheming at the café to get Huff on the podium….”
“What in heaven’s name are you blathering about?”
“Blathering?” Abner says. “You’re sounding Irish. Like Peggy used to talk.”
“What’s this about Huff and a podium? Like in his church?”
“They want him to ride up on horseback….”
“Where?”
“At their big rally in Bone Coulee. The light show.”
“This election has you all stirred up,” Mac says.
“The light show and rodeo are for Celebrate Saskatchewan, not for Sask Party propaganda.”
“You should suggest that Johnny Puff ride up in his biodiesel Rabbit.”
“Your son’s on the municipal council, and he’s got them convinced to build a new road right down to the site. They want to cut into the hill for seating. They figure there’ll be more than a hundred campers parked where the tipi rings are, in addition to the horse trailers that come for rodeo.”
“Lee hasn’t said anything to me about the road,” Mac says. “Maybe I should go out there this afternoon.”
Roseanna calls from the living room. “Eh…eh…Angela!”
“I’ll see what she wants,” Angela says. “If you like, help yourselves to more coffee.”
“No thanks,” Mac says. “Abner and I may as well get started on the cage.”
“But you’d better talk to them,” Abner says.
As soon as they are out the door, Roseanna comes back into the kitchen. “Ask him to take you there,” she says. “Let the spirits talk to you there. Make him fight with his son.”
When Angela gets outside, Mac is already pacing out the dimensions for the owl cage, and he marks each corner where he’ll sink a post.
“Plug the extension cord in that outlet on the side of the house,” he tells Abner. He connects the cord to the power auger and drills a two-foot hole. Abner drops in a post, and Mac tamps rocks down around it with his crowbar. They do the same on each corner, and they are ready for the boards and the chicken wire.
“You said you were going out to Bone Coulee this afternoon?” Angela asks from where she’s been sitting on the back step, watching them work.
“Right after lunch,” Mac says.
“Mind if I come along?”
“I don’t see why not. You might even be able to help me out if I get into a squabble with the municipal council. It’s not just my heritage they’re messing around with…without my permission. They’re messing around w
ith yours too. You likely have more clout than I do when dealing with the upper levels of government.”
When the cage is done, Mac asks Abner if he’d like a lift home, but Abner says he needs the exercise. He also can’t join them on the look around at Bone Coulee, because he’s going door-knocking with John Popoff.
“You could have lunch with us,” Angela tells Mac, but he’s got some leftover Kraft Dinner that he should finish up before it goes bad. He tells Angela that he will pick her up after lunch.
As the truck drives out, and as Abner struts in his shaking fashion out the backyard, Roseanna comes out of the house with her cane. She studies the owl cage and then shakes her head.
“No good to keep an owl,” she tells Angela.
The owl blinks its eyes, then fixes a stare right at Roseanna.
“It is scheming,” Roseanna says. She blinks several times back at the bird. “If we have to have it here, and we have to feed it, maybe it can help us with my brother’s death.”
• Chapter 10 •
Mac takes time for a short nap to settle his Kraft Dinner. After building the owl cage, he needs a bit of a rest, especially if they are going to walk any distance in the coulee.
He pulls on the lever of his La-Z-Boy. Soon he’s fast asleep, but then the dreams come: images of testimony, police and courtrooms.
The policeman said:
I saw some blood on his nose
and in his mouth and it was
bubbling from breathing….
The lawyer said:
Oh, he was breathing…?
The policeman said:
Yes he was, and I could also
see a pulse beat in his throat….
Mac wakes, the same instant clutching the footrest handle on the chair, bolting himself upright. He goes to the bathroom and runs cold water, splashing it on his face and the back of his neck. He puts his hand on his chest to feel his heart racing as if out of control, and he’s breathing just as fast. He’s got to get out of the house for some fresh air, out of the house to clear his head of its demons.
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