Bone Coulee

by Larry Warwaruk

  With his hands gripped to the steering wheel, he’s tense, but at least he feels some control. He feels more at home in the cab of his truck than he does in his own living room. Shevchenko’s poems have relaxed him before; the book is somewhere in the truck. Then he spots Angela waiting for him on the sidewalk in front of her house.

  “I’ve brought my sketchbook along,” Angela says. “Mother says that Bone Coulee might inspire me.”

  “She’s not coming with us?”

  “I didn’t ask her. Mother’s just as happy to stay home and watch Coronation Street.”

  If it hadn’t have been for the university professor last summer explaining to Mac the significance of Bone Coulee, he’d feel damned uncomfortable. He’s nerved-up as it is with his dreams, and a man with any blood at all in his veins, no matter how old, can’t help but squirm when he sneaks a side glance at the blue jeans on the seat beside him. She being Aboriginal, at least they have a legitimate reason to drive out to Bone Coulee. They have artistic reasons; she has her sketchbook, and if he really wants to get down to it, Mac has his book of Shevchenko poems, if that is legitimate.

  “Mother says the coulee is filled with spirits.” Angela stares out the side window. “Even these stubble fields that are no longer prairie, that no longer nurture buffalo….”

  “And the empty farmyards,” Mac says. I remember when they contained families.” Mac feels the spirit of the pioneers; cream separators, pitchforks, a dance at Buffalo Hollow.

  The school is gone, but the yard is still there, and it’s put to use. Provincial regulation requires the containment of empty herbicide and pesticide containers, so the municipality has constructed a chain-link fence around the property. It overflows with twenty-litre plastic pails, jugs, cardboard boxes filled with plastic jugs, plastic bags that could fill a truck box filled with jugs.

  “Stop,” Angela says. “I’ll do a sketch.”

  “It used to be I might buy a pail of 2,4-D,” Mac says. “ Maybe two. Maybe some Avadex for the wild oats. And that’s it.”

  “Chemical Mountain,” Angela says.

  Achieve Extra Gold, Reglone,

  Lorsban, Pursuit, Bravo,

  Pursuit Ultra, Poast Ultra,

  Odyssey, Lontrel,

  Frontier, Roundup….

  “A landscape for Picasso,” Angela says.

  “Modern art stuff, eh? All mixed up in bits and pieces.”

  DyVel, Eclipse, Edge,

  Freedom Gold, Horizon,

  Rustler, Admire, Muster Gold,

  Muster Gold 11, Pinnacle,

  Harmony....

  Angela sketches one page, and then another, and another, all from different angles. “Chemical Mountain. I’ll call it Chemical Mountain. The pile reminds me of Picasso’s Guernica,” Angela says. “And Zyklon B from the Farben gas chambers, where the Bayer company, and Hoechst, got their start. Phizer. Monsanto.....”

  “You learn that at art school?”

  “I took a modern European history class.”

  Prevail, Puma, Pea Pack,

  Gaucho Canola System,

  Decis, Cygon/Lagon/Hopper Stopper,

  Pounce....

  “You can now get Roundup in 450-litre tanks,” Mac says. “They’ll even deliver it to the farm now, in the big tankers.” Just like they do gasoline and farm diesel.”

  As they near the trail that leads down to the old Chorniak homestead, Mac notices a blue truck parked along the top of the hill. He figures that it has to be Andy McGuire, the stonemason from Bad Hills. He drives a little faster to see how much the workman has done on the cairn.

  “G’day to ya, Mac,” Andy says, as if to honour the name. “And I see ya ga’ someone wi’ ya.” He rips open a bag of mortar mix and dumps a portion into a pail. Andy came over from Scotland during the Grant Devine years to do the greystone work on the university’s new agriculture building. He’s retired now, living in Bad Hills, from where he finds himself being called upon to build cairns for old school sites all over the province.

  “Be done by nightfall,” Andy says. “Then the plaque is all.”

  “Looks like you’re doing a fine job, Andy. By the way,” Mac says, “you haven’t happened to notice anybody snooping around here? Municipality work truck?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Well, we better get on our way. Don’t want to hold you back from your work.”

  “Aye, you don’t that,” Andy says.

  It has been a long fall, with the grass staying green and the trees still leafed out in an array of colours: yellow, brown, orange and red. The chokecherry bushes are covered with clusters of overripe, wrinkled berries. Mac parks by the ash grove, and he and Angela get out to walk along the floor of the coulee, south, towards the tipi rings and the rock on which Indian women centuries ago scraped buffalo hides. Angela runs her hand along the rock’s smoothness.

  “You know what they used this rock for?” Mac says.

  “Yes, to clean the hides.”

  He watches her hand caress the rock, and he watches the movement of her slender wrist. If only he were young again. What must be going through her mind? She must feel the mystery down here, like Taras Shevchenko felt the mystery of his dispossessed homeland. Shevchenko wrote of himself as a boy, watching the lambs in the landlord’s meadow, and dreaming of a childhood sweetheart:

  She spoke a soothing phrase,

  and gently dried my weeping eyes,

  and kissed my tear-wet face….

  A buck deer appears out of nowhere, its nose sniffing the ground. It runs helter-skelter, head swinging back and forth across the ground like a minesweeper. He’s in rut, with his neck glands swelled and throbbing. Zigging and zagging, he runs to disappear into the brush along the base of the buffalo jump. Moments later, a doe appears out of the willows, running across the coulee floor and up the west hillside, the buck in pursuit.

  “Catch that on a movie camera!” Mac says.

  Mac and Angela walk back to the ash grove. The air within the grove has a forest smell, and the ground is a soft carpet of matted leaves. The tree trunks bend askew and are covered with bumps. Angela brushes away some leaves to expose the flat rocks of an old foundation.

  “My grandmother lived here,” Angela says.

  “My late wife and I used to picnic down here,” Mac says. “She was Irish, and she said to be down here reminded her of Ireland’s magic bogs and the leprechauns.”

  “Like Mother said, the spirits….”

  They walk down to the boggy creek bed, wet from the trickle of a hidden spring. During the spring melt, the water flows in a regular current to the stink lake. A hundred years ago, before the prairie was plowed up, the creek flowed throughout the summer. Mac recites lines memorized from a Shevchenko poem:

  “…listen through the years

  To the river voices roaring,

  Roaring in my ears….”

  “I saw your poetry book in the truck. Is that one of the poems?”

  “Part of one. I’ll get it if you’d like to hear the whole thing.”

  “Sure, as soon as I finish my deer sketch.”

  Mac waits, sitting in the truck. There’s no fool like an old fool, he thinks, to be reciting poetry like a Ukrainian minstrel. He studies the lines, reading to himself to find meaning in his own fields and hills, and how after half a century of working them, he has to leave them. It makes him wonder sometimes that the only thing that hasn’t left him is his memory of the bloodshed in his life.

  He walks back down, and Angela’s finished the drawing. She shows the buck’s antlers erect, the doe at his side, nosing the swollen glands on his neck. She closes her sketchbook, and tells Mac that she’s ready to listen to him read.

  “When I hear the call

  Of the raging flood,

  Loud with hated blood,

  I will leave them all,

  Fields and hills; and force my way

  Right up to the Throne

  Where God sits alone;
/>
  Clasp his feet and pray….

  But till that day

  What is God to me?

  Bury me, be done with me,

  Rise and break your chain,

  Water your new liberty

  With blood for rain.

  Then, in the mighty family

  Of all men that are free,

  May be, sometimes, very softly

  You will speak of me?”

  “So very sad,” Angela says.

  “There’s no raging flood in this creekbed,” Mac says. “Let’s hike up a way, and we might find some arrowheads.”

  “You’d just take them?”

  “I have a whole collection. You should see my rumpus room.”

  They don’t find any artifacts, but their walk is not wasted. It’s warm, but not too warm. A rabbit hops in and out of a clump of brush. Crows flock in swirls, over one bluff and on to another. A porcupine hangs from a limb, as if clinging for dear life. Yet the surrounding branches are all stripped of their bark, so if the porcupine is in danger of falling, fear hasn’t prevented it from eating its fill.

  When they get back to the buffalo jump, Mac notices that some dirt has fallen away, and a small stone object protrudes from the bank.

  “Will you look at this?” he tells Angela. “Talk about artifacts!” He holds a carved figurine in the palm of his hand. It is the shape of a duck’s head: the slope of its beak, little circles for eyes, grooves on each side of its mouth and an indented band around its neck.

  “Put it back,” Angela says.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “It belongs here. Someone must have worn it. Would it have been rolled up in a medicine bundle and buried here? I could ask an Elder.”

  “I’ll take it to the university,” Mac says, putting the relic in his pocket. “It’s time we headed back to town.”

  • Chapter 11 •

  Any idea what it might be worth?” Pete asks.

  “How do you put a price on something like that?” Mac says. He takes the stone duck back from Pete. “I’ve never seen anything like it. My father never found anything like it in the dirty thirties, when the land blew down to hardpan. He gathered up pails full of arrowheads, but nothing like this.”

  “Put it on eBay,” Sid says. “Everything’s got a price. All it takes is to find a buyer.”

  “I’m not selling anything,” Mac says. “But if I keep losing at pea pool, I might just as well put this table on eBay.”

  For years, every Monday morning in Mac’s basement, they have played pea pool. When the pool hall closed, Mac bought one of the tables. It took four men to carry each slate to the truck, and they slid them down planks through Mac’s basement window. The rumpus room takes up most of the basement, and the pool table takes up most of the rumpus room. Since Peggy died, the room’s gone a bit stale…dank, like a hunter’s cabin up in the forest that’s been closed up all year but for a month in the fall. Mac’s trophy mule-deer rack is mounted up on the wall, and his arrowhead collection is displayed in picture frames. Should he get a special case made up for the duck? Before he does anything, he should let Darlene give the room a good housecleaning.

  Not much has changed in their game of pea pool, except instead of nickels and dimes it’s a dollar a kill, a dollar from everybody for the eight ball and five dollars when you sink your own.

  “I think Sid has the five pea,” Abner says.

  “Hey?” Pete says, shifting his aim from the fourteen ball to the five.

  “Play your own game, Abner. How would you know what pea I have?”

  Pete shoots the five ball into the corner pocket, drawing his cue ball back for a clear shot at the eight.

  “I’m dead,” Sid says. “And next time, Abner, keep your mouth shut.”

  “Then keep your pea in your pocket instead of taking it out to look at every time it’s your shot.”

  “Hey, Mac,” Pete says as he chalks his cue. “You weren’t by yourself when you found that duck, hey? What’s going on with you and her? Hey? Hey?”

  “Hurry up and shoot,” Nick says.

  “But maybe something else is going on. Her mother snooping around at the café the other day? Just what are they doing here? What are they looking for?”

  “The old lady gave you the once-over a few times,” Nick says. “Maybe she wants your body.”

  Pete aims at the side pocket. “Whack!” The eight ball drops. “That will be a dollar from each of you,” he says, and then he sinks the one ball, the number on his pea. “And another five dollars each.”

  “Jeepers! Just my luck,” Jeepers says. “It was my turn to shoot next, and my nine was right by the hole!”

  “I wonder if they do know something?” Sid asks. “Have they said anything to you, Mac?”

  “It’s nothing to do with that. The young one teaches at the college in Bad Hills, and she lives here because the rent’s cheap.”

  “Are they treaty Indians?” Nick asks. “From Three Crows?”

  “The guy from Three Crows who bought my land is the artist’s brother,” Abner says.

  “Anyway,” Pete says to Mac, “don’t get in too deep, and I’d watch out for that old lady.”

  • Chapter 12 •

  If Roseanna has grievances about the past, her daughter is not without the same feelings. So many wrongs, for so many years, on both sides. But unlike her mother, she doesn’t have a concrete picture of the past wrongs. Angela’s pictures are abstract. The death of an uncle who died long before she was born doesn’t affect her the way it does her mother. Angela sees nothing of this on the face of Mac Chorniak. All she detects is the kind look of an old man. Without her mother’s obsession for revenge, Angela verges on feelings of guilt because her focus is more and more on her new job.

  The regional college let Angela know that someone in Bad Hills wants to get rid of an old deep-freeze. All they have to do is get somebody to pick it up. Until now she’s kept her willow canes in the freezer that’s in the house, taking only enough for her first few sessions with her students. Now she will be able to store what she’ll need for the course and won’t have to worry about the bark drying up. She has the osiers tied in bundles in the back of her panel truck, ready for the trip to Bad Hills.

  Last night she did have a hard time getting to sleep, as she kept thinking about the stone duck. Her mother has been no help. Angela couldn’t free her mind from Roseanna’s words:

  “Report Chorniak to the authorities!”

  First she harped on about the stone duck, and then she switched to the owl. She raved on about being left alone to contend with it.

  “It’s your owl, not mine,” she said. “Why aren’t you working its magic on Chorniak?” Then she’d get back to the duck:

  “It is a sign. The coulee’s spirit shows itself to us, not to Chorniak.”

  In the middle of the night Angela tossed and turned, in and out of dreams. Owls hooted and black ravens croaked, “Magic! Magic! Magic!”

  Before she leaves town, she stops at the café for a package of gum. As she steps back outside, an air horn blasts three times from a semi parked across the street. A young man up in the cab waves to her.

  “You must be the artist,” he says, jumping down from the cab. “Got time for a coffee?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m Garth Chorniak. You know my mother. Not every day on the streets of Duncan do I get the chance to meet a real live artist, and one that’s so good looking.”

  “Is that a bribe?”

  “Come on. The coffee’s on me, and we’ll see if Tung Yee’s got any of them bagels. Nothing better for breakfast than a hot bagel with cream cheese.”

  “That’s a trucker’s breakfast?”

  “An artist’s breakfast. We’d get along just fine.”

  “Oh, you think so? I’m to fall for all your sweet talk?”

  “Are you in a rush to go some place?”

  She should just walk away. He must think he’s God’s gift to women. O
r does he talk to white girls like this? But she might find some way to use him….

  “What do you say…? Coffee?”

  “I like cream cheese and bagels.”

  Tung Yee greets them at the door.

  “You got cream cheese and bagels?” Garth asks.

  “Toasted. I get it right away,” Tung Yee says. “Start with coffee. Or Angela want tea, like her mother?”

  “Coffee might help keep me awake on the drive to Bad Hills.”

  “Good strong coffee,” Tung Yee says. “Those men always want strong coffee. Kwok Ming tell them, not good for old men. Tea better. Young people, it is okay.” She pours two cups, then scurries to the kitchen.

  “Not every day you meet an artist on the streets of Duncan,” Garth says.

  “So you’re a patron of the arts?” Angela smiles. “Like your grandfather with his poetry?”

  “You could say that I’m a bit of an artist. A bull rider, if that’s an artist. You’ll have to come and watch. The Bone Coulee Rodeo is coming up quick. I’ll be competing against some of your guys.”

  “My guys?”

  “Indians. And Métis riders. Some of the best in the business.”

  Angela smiles again. He doesn’t seem to be patronizing. Bull riders are all the same, Indian or white.

  “It’s the Bone Coulee Rodeo’s fortieth anniversary. My score’s close to getting me into the Canadian finals in Edmonton.”

  “My brother Glen used to ride bulls.”

  “Really?”

  “Twelve years ago he took ‘the big cheque’ at Agribition.”

  Garth’s eyes light up. “Rodeo goes a long way back around here. Grandpa says that his grandpa bought horses from the Métis at Round Prairie. The Métis would catch wild horses and break them in to sell to farmers. And they’d put on shows. One guy trained his horse to dive off a thirty-foot tower into a tank of water.”

  “Hot toasted bagels!” Tung Yee says, setting the plates down, and then refilling their cups. Garth spreads cheese on his bagel and sets it back on the plate.