BONE DANCE
Also by Martha Brooks
True Confessions of a Heartless Girl
Being with Henry
Two Moons in August
Traveling On into the Light and Other Stories
BONE DANCE
Martha Brooks
Copyright © 1997 by Martha Brooks
Fourth mass market printing 2005
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801, Toronto, ON M5V 2K4
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West
1700 Fourth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Ontario Arts Council.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Brooks, Martha
Bone dance
A Groundwood book.
ISBN-13: 978-0-88899-336-6
ISBN-10: 0-88899-336-6
I. Title.
PS8553.R66B66 1998 jC813’.54 C97-931491-7
PZ7.B66Bo 1998
Cover photograph by Jim Brandenberg / Minden Pictures
Book design by Mina Greenstein
Printed and bound in Canada
For my daughter,
Kirsten Jay Brooks, Blue Wolf
And the memory of her beloved grandfather,
Alfred Leroy Paine
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the children of the Earth.”
—CHIEF SEATTLE,
from his address to the president of the
United States, 1855
“In the purity of the morning, I see how much more there is to the world than meets the eye.…”
—SHARON BUTALA
from The Perfection of the Morning:
An Apprenticeship in Nature
part one
THE SPIRITS
1
In the middle of the night, in the middle of her eleventh-grade year, in the middle of the coldest Manitoba winter for a century, Grandpa called to say that he was worried about “the dark.”
“It’s night, Grandpa. It’s night and time to go to bed.”
“It just rolls in, Alex,” he continued, “and all I can do is watch. It’s terrible. I can’t sleep.”
She knew that the cancer wouldn’t let him sleep. Plus, lately he seemed confused. A nurse was with him during the day. Then Alex and Mom and Auntie Francine took turns being with him during the evening. At midnight, when they were back in their own beds, it was hard to turn off thoughts, to sleep, peacefully to dream.
“I’ll come over. Okay?” Tears tumbled down her cheeks onto her red turtleneck sweater, which she hadn’t bothered to change out of before falling into bed. “I’ll be right there, Grandpa.”
“No,” he said, clearing his throat, reclaiming his dignity. “No, Alexandra Marie Sinclair. You need to rest. I shouldn’t have called. I just wanted to hear your voice one more time today. How’s school?”
She didn’t want him to die. But how could she wish for her grandpa to stay with all that he had suffered?
“Grandpa,” she said, “I love you. Please try to go to sleep. You need to rest, too.”
“Well, I’ve worried you. This isn’t like me,” he said forlornly, reading her mind as usual. “I’m not myself lately.”
She got off the phone and rolled back into bed but couldn’t sleep. She kept seeing him up in his apartment, slack-jawed, watching in terror as the dark pressed against his fourteenth-floor living-room window. She thought about the mysteries of the universe and about how, soon, they would all unfold for him. And about how she’d be left behind. And about how this was becoming a pattern in her life.
When her mother was nineteen years old, she came home late one night, marched into the kitchen, and announced to Grandpa and Grandma, who was then still alive, “I’m going to marry Earl McKay. And there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.”
Well, they didn’t stop her. And it became an infamous family story. “She was the most unstoppable young woman,” Grandpa said. “Stubborn. Full of pride. Of course we worried that it would end up bad. And we were right. Earl McKay didn’t choose to stick around after you were born. But it did mean that I got to spend more time with you. So there you go!
Life is full of surprises, and sometimes the good ones and the bad ones get all bunched up together.”
According to Auntie Francine, Alex was badly spoiled by them all. “If you asked for the moon,” said Francine, “Grandpa Paul would hang it shining around your neck in a minute. But we’ve all spoiled you. We’re to blame for lavishing all this love on you so that you’ve come to expect it, like royalty.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Auntie.”
“It’s true,” said Francine, grabbing her close, kissing her hair. “You’ve always been marked for something special. Just don’t let it go to your head.”
Three nights after Grandpa called about the dark, Alex was out with Serena Fitzpatrick and Andrea Larkin and Jeremy Huntinghawk in the snowy park down the street. It was the only place nearby where she could find the solace of the country in the middle of the city. On this prairie winter night, deep in the sleeping heart of January, it was twenty-six below zero. The only light was the moon, dazzling down on the snow.
They played tag all through the cathedral of frozen trees. And then Jeremy said, “Okay, now, on the count of three, everybody howl.”
They threw back their heads and counted, and then they howled. Like feral creatures. Like heartsick lonely wolves. And it felt so good as they ran through the snow crying, “A-wooo!” at the flying moon. “A-wah-wah-woooo!”
She stopped to watch the others howling and leaping. And it was at this moment that she knew her grandfather had just moved, without saying good-bye, far beyond her reach. With absolute certainty, her heart thudding against her chest, she knew that he had slipped past her, past them all, past the dark of winter and midnight and consciousness and eating and sleeping and caring. Then she watched as her own breath rose in front of her astonished eyes, took form, and floated like a spirit hand on the crystal air.
2
The end of a hot dusty day in early August. Lonny pulled the truck off the road. The wheels bumped down the rutted grassy trail. Leaf-rattling poplar trees crowded in, then chokecherry bushes, scraping past the windows, thrumming the silver aerial.
The trail ended in the wide clearing that overlooked Fatback Lake. They lurched to a halt. Earl McKay slowly got down from the passenger’s side, blinking his eyes like a newborn baby.
Lonny got out, too, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans, showing this worn-out cowboy that he was more casual than he felt. Showing him this property that had been in his stepfather’s family since the first LaFrenière, a Métis trapper and buffalo hunter, took up land along the lake and up into the Lacs des Placottes Valley hills.
The ancestral LaFrenière log cabin, once snug and sturdy, was as gray and sagging as an abandoned wasp’s nest. Behind that were the cut banks, the hills, and that particular one with its Indian burial mound that everyone for miles around called Medicine Bluff. As always, the mound was rosy and beautiful in the fading light of day. A
s always, he could feel the presence of the furious spirits rising around it.
“I’ll haul in that old house trailer your stepdad offered me,” said Earl. “Then I’ll build my own little place where I can sit high and dry and watch the lake break up next spring, yessir.” He lined his finger up to the woodlands—the white birches, the scrub oaks, the poplars, the rocks where mosses grew, the sloping banks—and slowly turned three hundred and sixty degrees until he faced the lake again.
“I’ve got to admit,” he continued with a satisfied sigh, “this place is as close to heaven as I’m ever going to find. I’m half a century old and tired of moving around.”
He looked sharply at Lonny. “What made your stepdad change his mind and decide to sell?”
Lonny kicked at the tires. “It’s not good for anything,” he mumbled.
“Now I know you’re being modest. You were raised right close. Isn’t that true?”
“Since I was seven,” Lonny said, and then wished he hadn’t.
“Seven? Why, that’s most of your lifetime, boy. Isn’t that so? Don’t you want to keep it?”
None of your damn business, he thought, his jaw muscles tightening.
Earl persisted. “Figured the way your stepdad feels about you, that’d be the last thing he’d want to sell. Land that’s been in the family for generations.”
In the neighboring farms, everyone knew enough to avoid talking about the selling of this particular parcel of land. There was Jacob Wiebe, for instance. Out of respect and affection for Pop, he talked around it, standing beside his truck, saying things like, “Well, Tom, one thing’s for sure, time don’t stand still.” Avoiding Pop’s eyes. Squinting instead at the sun. “If you need anything, don’t you hesitate to ask.”
But Earl McKay didn’t seem to have any sense of what Pop called good old-fashioned country propriety.
“I don’t want to rush you,” said Lonny, “but I have to get back pretty soon.”
He couldn’t wait to get back into the truck and take the hell off. Away from the whisperings of the Ancients. Away to the safety of the prairie farm road.
Earl McKay was in no hurry. He sniffed the air as if he were a man just let out of prison. As if he truly didn’t understand that some places had the power to do anything they wanted to you. Well, let him find out for himself. There was nothing in the world that was going to stop him now. He’d been back twice already, making the trip on the bus from Lethbridge across two provinces with one eye, probably, on the horizon, just counting the minutes until he owned the LaFrenière homestead.
Back at home Pop had served them all the last of the venison soup from the deer he’d shot early this spring and cut up and put in their freezer.
It had only been half-grown. “We have to eat, son,” was all the explanation Pop had given Lonny the day he’d come dragging it home through the bush. Lonny had just gotten off the school bus. He’d stood in the yard with a History of the Modern World textbook and two ridiculously bright purple binders tucked under his arm. He pushed his glasses back up his nose and stared hard at the deer. Its head wobbled back in the snow. A thin string of blood and mucus came from its nose.
Since then, things had been gradually improving. Pop had sold everything but the homestead and another small piece of land: five acres of hills and woodlands and pasture where they still lived in the bright yellow bungalow. He’d found work at the Beaver Lumber store in town. In a few short months, he’d worked himself up to assistant manager, and he went about this job with a quiet dignity even though his heart wasn’t in it. His heart was still on the land, and Lonny knew it probably always would be.
Lonny also had found work. Part-time at a gas station that didn’t mind that his hair curved down past his shoulders. Mr. Johnson, his boss, had told Pop, “That big boy of yours is real personable. A charmer, just like his mother was. Everybody likes Lonny.”
Everybody except those damn spirits. At least, since he was twelve years old, they’d stopped coming into his bedroom at night.
3
Robert Lang, his oldest friend in the world, poked his head in the truck window, leaned on one arm, nodded his head after the retreating Earl McKay, and said, “So who’s the cowboy?”
“Buying up the homestead,” said Lonny, watching Earl’s back disappear into the house. “He’s gone inside with Pop.”
“And how’s he taking it?” Robert pulled back, looked down at his feet, kicked lightly at the side of the truck.
“Not good.”
“You going into town later?”
“I don’t know,” said Lonny. “Maybe. Why?”
“A party. Over at Sherry-Lynne Baker’s place. I came all this way to tell you about it, stud,” he drawled.
“Yeah, all five miles.” Lonny grinned at goofy Robert.
“So,” said Robert cheerfully, “you gonna join us? Or you gonna stay home and baby-sit your pop?”
“Don’t know,” said Lonny, resenting that last remark.
“Come on,” Robert urged. “What’s he going to do once you move out? Things’ll just keep goin’ on the same old way as they have since your ma died. Whether you’re there or not. Nothing you can do to change that. Am I right?”
“That’s not the point. He shouldn’t be alone tonight.”
“Suit yourself.” Robert drummed a happy little beat on the truck door. “Don’t drag your ass out on my account.”
“I’ll think about it, man.” Lonny flopped his head back on the seat and wondered how much more of this he could take. I owe that man in there my life, he thought, and all I ever seem to do is watch him suffer again and again. What a pathetic world.
Robert, reaching in, lightly punched Lonny’s shoulder. “It isn’t your fault that he’s selling. Cut yourself a little slack there, buddy. It’s his decision, right?” And then he left.
His decision. A savings account earmarked for other things, special things, Pop said. What special things? Well, for your life. Imagine, you could be the first LaFrenière to get a real education.
God knows he didn’t want the homestead, and Pop understood this. He didn’t have to say a single word. The property, and all that it had meant to over one hundred years of LaFrenières, was itself a ghost. It hovered between them, anxious, alert to the currents of human emotion.
Well, maybe now, Lonny thought, he’ll start to forget. And then, God help me, I can, too.
But it wasn’t going to be easy. Several hours later Pop stood in the kitchen like a man lost in his own house. And then, when Lonny couldn’t think of what else to do, he asked if he could get him anything.
“No, no.” Pop shook his head, slowly leaned over. Picked up a button that, hanging by a thread, had finally toppled off his sweater onto the floor. Turned it over thoughtfully. Looked at it. Put it in his pocket. He wiped his hand over his face, looked up at the moon that had risen outside the kitchen window. “It’s been a long day,” he said.
Lonny thought about another day. The deep blue sky of autumn. The truck ride, with his new stepfather, onto the property. Mr. LaFrenière smiled his big gap-toothed smile, took his cap, put it on Lonny.
He was small back then, even for seven. When they got out of the truck, Pop called him a sack of potatoes. He picked him up and threw him over his shoulder and carried him, yelling for the cap that had just flown off. Lonny laughed, upside down. The ground was the sky and the sky, the ground.
“And now, I’m going to show you the prettiest sight in all of Manitoba,” Pop said, sliding Lonny down off his back.
Lonny rushed back to get the cap, then roared after him, through the bushes, pumping his small sturdy legs to keep up with Pop, who was climbing up Medicine Bluff just like he had no legs at all. Like he had wings for feet.
At the top, both of them out of breath, Pop sat down, pulling Lonny beside him. He reached to smooth a silvery green plant with his hand. “Smell,” he said, and Lonny bent over and inhaled for the first time the pungent medicinal smell of prairie sage.
>
A September sun shone fully on the straw-colored grasses. A flock of pelicans flew over the lake below, gliding like thunderheads just above the surface of the water.
But what Lonny remembered noticing most of all was the silence. And the peaceful feeling that grew right up inside him. This big prairie country was filled for miles around with the sounds of wind and crickets. A car crawled silently along the yellow gravel road at the other side of the valley.
“This, that we are sitting on,” Pop had said, indicating the slight contour that rose a couple of feet above the natural top of the hill. “This is an Indian burial mound. It has the distinction of being one of the few left in this province that hasn’t been dug up and inspected by grave robbers.”
“Robbers?”
“My grandfather—and that would be your greatgrandfather by association, since you have now become a LaFrenière—he broke his back buffalo hunting. Can you imagine a time that long ago?”
“Did he get better?”
“Oh, yes. But this land that you see all around, it was here before him. It was here before the earliest people. And most certainly it was here before the French and the English. And the Métis,” he said, indicating his own heart. “It’s old, Lonny. Old as time. So that’s why we have to take care of it. It’s our job. Our responsibility.” He paused, patted the mound. “Here rest the bones of an ancient person.”
“Here? Right here?”
“That’s right.”
“How do you know he’s ancient?” Lonny liked the sound of the word.
“Because those first people, they buried their most revered in the highest places. Right beneath us rest the bones of a medicine man. Or maybe a great chief! Or my name isn’t Thomas LaFrenière.” He paused dramatically. Lonny leaned against him and looked up into his face.
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