Bone Dance

by Martha Brooks

  All the letters he had ever sent to her, half a dozen, nested like hollow eggs in a small brown box on her window ledge. Addressed in his faded scrawling handwriting to Miss Alexandra Marie Sinclair. Through the years each letter had scratched at the faint tracings of his life. The pale postal stamp on the first letter said Calgary, Alberta.

  She’s six years old. Her mother leans against the doorway of the kitchen in a long white bathrobe and watches her open the letter. That night she can’t sleep, she is so excited. In the morning, her mother makes her put it away. In its proper place. But she keeps stealing it out to look at it.

  And the next letter? No return address again. But the postmaster’s stamp read Indian Head, Saskatchewan.

  No, you can’t write back to him. How would he get it? He’s probably moved on anyway.

  Dear Daddy, I can’t send this letter. But I’m writing to you anyway. It’s wintertime. Are you cold? Why don’t you come and see me? You could stay at Grandpa’s house. He has an extra bedroom. Your loving daughter, Alexandra Marie Sinclair.

  Letter number three came from Medicine Hat.

  Dear Alexandra Marie, How are you? I am fine and working at a ranch. Have a happy 10th birthday. Sincerely, Earl McKay.

  Dear Father, I know you won’t get this letter. But I’m sending it anyway. Why don’t you ever ever ever come and visit me? Are you mad at me? I’m mad at you. Please send me another letter or I will never speak to you ever again. Your daughter, in case you have forgotten, Alexandra Marie McKay-Sinclair.

  In the fourth letter he had moved on to Lethbridge. Moving. Always moving.

  She’s sitting in a restaurant with Mom and Auntie Francine. Her aunt is going on about how that “nomad” was thirteen years older than her mother—unlucky thirteen—and about how he was always full of schemes and big ideas. And her mother, clinking perfect unpolished nails against a water glass, tells Francine, “Well, I loved him. Once.”

  An old argument. As old as his letters to her. In his fifth letter he was back here, in Manitoba.

  Dear Alexandra, I’m here in the Lacs des Placottes Valley. Staying for a while. It’s a beautiful day. I like it here. Say hello to your mother if she cares for me to remember her. I hope you have a good summer. Take time, as they say, to smell the roses. Wild ones, I figure, are the best. Take care, my girl. And always look the world straight in the eye. Sincerely, Earl McKay.

  Dear Dad, I am…

  Dear Dad, How are…?

  Dear Dad, I don’t know what to say to you.…

  And in his sixth and final letter, he’d gone back to Lethbridge.

  Her mom brought in the morning mail. She was spending longer than usual in the hallway. In the kitchen, Alex and Auntie Francine were playing cards. Francine shook with laughter, so pleased with herself for putting down two one-eyed jacks.

  “Did I ever tell you about that first time I saw all three of them?” Grandpa had asked Alex many times, always just before he launched into, “Your grandmother and her two little girls. Your mother was so small and delicate, and Francine like a gawky bird with those big eyes. Just like I’d seen them in my dream. I had to rub the cobwebs out of my own eyes. There they were, all three of them, standing outside the Hudson’s Bay Company Store, at Caribou Post. That was 1964. Your grandmother was newly widowed. But she had a brilliant red ribbon in her hair. And she wore it proudly, like she owned the world. I see her even now”—he’d close his eyes— “always that red ribbon. And I knew I had found my heart’s home.”

  As he spoke, she would pore over this historical moment in his life, each detail standing brightly in her mind: the grandmother she never got to meet, Mom, and Auntie Francine, all of them so young in that faraway place.

  Alex slowly began to pick up ten more cards, drawing out the agony. She loved playing this stupid game of crazy eights with her nutty aunt.

  Her mom came back into the kitchen. In a low clear voice, she said, “Earl’s dead.” Her fingers trembled. She gripped the edges of thin letter paper. Francine’s smile dropped like a stone in dark water.

  Alex took a deep breath. She thought about Grandpa. She got silver-white flashes of the park that January night, of running through the snow, of the ambulance outside Grandpa’s apartment block.

  A second deep breath. Her mother pulling her into her arms. “Your grandfather is dead,” she whispered. A simple statement. Your grandfather is dead.

  A third breath. Earl McKay was her father.

  A fourth breath. Quietly, with wonder, she said, “Last night I dreamed about him dying.”

  “How?” said Francine, who didn’t appear to have heard what she had just said. “What does the letter say, Jeanette?”

  Mom folded and unfolded the letter. Finally, she tucked it in her pocket. “That he died of pneumonia.”

  “Pah!” Francine exclaimed, throwing up her hands. “If I know Earl McKay, there’s more to it than that.”

  “More to what? Mom? What’s going on?”

  “I can’t believe you still haven’t told her,” Auntie Francine said with a kind of low, helpless rage. “You have a ridiculous attitude toward him, Jeanette. And you always have.”

  Alex’s mom just stood, unanswering, perfectly composed, her Dene bones, her rich silken skin, her black hair pulled back with a four-directions beaded hair clip, her ears glinting with silver and turquoise earrings. “Always a lady, just like her mother,” Grandpa used to say.

  Francine grabbed up her sweater and coat and her car keys and said, “You’re not going to read it to me, are you. If you want to be so stubborn and carry your pain around like it’s some goddamn jewel, well, go ahead.” Then she left. She was always leaving. Making abrupt exits. Her way of coping. But she always came back.

  Alex said, “What haven’t you told me, Mom?”

  Her father was “a catastrophe,” according to Auntie Francine. A series of catastrophes drove him away from home, away from them. First, he’s laid off from his construction job. Next, he gambles away the rent money in a poker game. She is born three days later during the middle of a howling blizzard. When Grandpa discovers catastrophe number two and shames her father by covering the rent money, he comes one more time to the hospital to see her and her mom. Then he takes off. A few months later family friends say they’ve seen him up in Edmonton. “At least then your mother knew he was alive,” said Francine, “not like some cat that didn’t come home because it went out and got run down by a bus.”

  Sometimes she thought he was a criminal. Sometimes she thought he was an ordinary man. Most times she thought he was a coward. Still, she had longed for those letters. Hoarded them, kept them perfectly in the shiny wooden box, memorized them.

  The, afternoon snowlight outside the window was brighter than bright. It hurt the eyes. The sky burned blue straight up to the heavens. Beyond that, the cosmos, the darkness of space. But down here, on planet earth, another winter day.

  Mom looked out the window. Her eyes suddenly teared up. “Every letter he ever sent you,” she said carefully, “you’ve kept like a sacred thing.”

  “Mom, that’s all I ever had of him.”

  She turned to look at Alex. “Exactly.”

  “What kind of an answer is that? I was six years old when I got his first letter. Mom, I could barely read. You could have kept it from me. But you didn’t. You gave it to me. You read it to me.” And you allowed me to get sick with excitement, she thought, but she would never say it. There are some things you should not say out loud.

  “Alex, he could never stick to anything for long. I’ve told you this before. But he loved you… in his own way.”

  She had one memory of him. Of a shadowy man coming to her crib one night when she was crying. Of him picking her up and singing to her. But in this memory she’s about three years old, so it was probably Grandpa. Or maybe she just dreamed it. Or maybe she just wanted it to be real.

  Alex felt her hands begin to tremble. “Where do you get this fantasy about him loving me?”
She stopped right there. The word fantasy, she could plainly see, flipped over her mother’s heart.

  Mom said, her eyes huge with sadness, “Will you let me read this letter to you?”

  The envelope, addressed to Miss Jeanette Sinclair, was from T. LaFrenière, Box 56, Lacs des Placottes, Manitoba. Inside was the letter and two other pieces of legal-looking paper. Mom carefully opened the letter again, placing it on the table, smoothing the crinkle lines, then lifted it and read aloud:

  “Dear Miss Sinclair, This is a difficult letter to write. It concerns a man named Earl McKay, who, I understand, was your husband and the father of your daughter, Alexandra Marie.

  “I regret to inform you that Earl passed away last week. He died of complications due to pneumonia. And he’d made sure, earlier, that I had your address. He did not want to trouble you with his funeral and wanted simply to be cremated. He also asked if I would straighten his affairs and effects after his death, and this is why I am writing. He left a will.”

  “A will?”

  “Just wait,” said Mom, waving her hand. “Let me get through this.” She took a breath, swallowed hard, and, hand over her heart, began again.

  “My involvement with him started when he came looking to buy a few acres of my land. At that time, I was not ready to sell, but he stayed for a few days, helping out around the place. Then he left, and I thought that was the end of it.

  “But he returned about a year later. And as he was willing to negotiate a very generous offer, I took him up on it. I needed the money, you see.

  “He didn’t appear like a man of any means at all. In actual fact, Miss Sinclair, he was something of a lone wolf. But perhaps you already knew this, and other things about him. I discovered that he was also a hard worker. So I guess that’s how he’d conducted his life all along.

  “He lived for a few months in the house trailer that he’d borrowed from me and pulled onto the land. But by winter he’d had a well dug and hadn’t he gone and completed building a fully winterized four-room cabin overlooking the lake there!

  “It was a shame that he never really got to enjoy it. But then life plays funny tricks sometimes, doesn’t it. Just when you think you’re away, you find out you’re not.

  “Anyway, the upshot of this is that his last will and testament leaves this cabin and the property to his daughter, Alexandra Marie.”

  “My father left me land? And a cabin by a lake?”

  “There’s more,” said her mom. “He evidently left you some money.”

  “Money?”

  “He left you almost seventeen thousand dollars.”

  “Seventeen thousand?”

  “Evidently. Yes. To cover yearly property taxes. Other expenses. It takes a lot of money to run a place.” She took another breath, held it, let it go like a thin prayer. “It’s all in his will. Here, read for yourself.”

  The words blurred. It was all very legal. She looked at the paper that gave over this piece of her father’s life. She ran her fingers over the document. She felt as if she were holding air.

  Alex thought of all the times when she was younger, when Mom had gone back to school and was so strapped for cash. It was Grandpa who was there to help out. He bought their groceries and paid their rent. He’d shuffle through the door, practically every Saturday afternoon, grocery bags bouncing against his lame leg, and say, “Now, Jeanette, stop that studying for a while and take a rest. Let’s make a little room on the table there. I noticed a special on oranges and chicken legs this week.”

  He would push aside all her mother’s accounting texts and notebooks that she bent so feverishly over every night, long after Alex had gone to bed. Then he’d sit down at the little kitchen table. If Alex was sitting in one of the chairs, he’d reach out and pull it, with her on it, skidding up alongside him.

  “Alexandra,” he’d say, “what do you know for sure today?”

  “Nothing.” She’d giggle, because that was what she was supposed to say.

  “Nothing! Well, we’d better fix that.”

  It was Grandpa who was there if either of them got sick. He was there for outings to the museum, to movies, to plays, to the sun-dappled hiking trails at La Barrière Park. And those camping trips to Spirit Lake, a lake so deep no one had ever found the bottom. He was there for science projects. He was there for every birthday. He knew all her favorite songs. And from the time she was a very little girl, he never made her feel bad for wanting the things she couldn’t have.

  Alex reached out and covered her mother’s hand with her own. “Don’t cry.… Mom? You’re crying over somebody who isn’t worth it.”

  Mom leaned back, pulled a Kleenex out of her cardigan sweater, blew her nose. “It’s just that…” She looked away. Then looking straight at Alex again, fresh tears flowing down her face, she said, “I have so many things to be sorry for.”

  “You?” said Alex, sad and bewildered. “What have you got to be sorry for?”

  One time, she and Grandpa were sitting together on Auntie Francine’s scratchy brown sofa. It was Sunday, and just the day after she’d gotten a letter from her dad, the one that referred to the roses.

  The two sisters, her mother and Auntie Francine, whispered together as they prepared dinner in the kitchen.

  “Paul,” Francine had said to Grandpa, “just relax. Let us fix you some tea.”

  In the kitchen, Auntie Francine, her eyes as cagey as a wolf’s, listened to the rise and fall of her sister’s voice. Alex could see them, positioned as she was in the middle of the sofa. She was twelve and a half years old.

  “Jeanette,” Francine finally interrupted, “why do you keep going over all these old hurts and hopes and memories? You’re like a broken record. Just let go of him, for heaven’s sake.”

  She raised her eyes briefly, saw Alex looking at them, then lowered her voice so that Alex could only pick out the odd word above the Disney show about bears that Grandpa was watching with rapt and respectful attention.

  But she knew, without even hearing the conversation, that her mother’s depressed mood had something to do with the letter. The sadness was always there, pervading their house each time another letter arrived. She felt guilty for wanting those letters when her mother got nothing. She felt even more guilty for wanting to know her father. To know who he really was.

  “Why…?” she began, and then stopped.

  “Why what, little bug?” Grandpa asked, pulling his eyes away from the bears.

  “Why,” she said again, in a very low voice, “aren’t there any photographs of him… of my dad?”

  Grandpa slipped his arm around her. “She tore them up. Every one of them.”

  “Why?” she ventured.

  “Someday she’ll tell you. When she’s ready.”

  He rocked her quietly for a while as she thought about this. A few minutes later he said, “We all make our mistakes. And we live with them. We all do the best we can. Things work out. Usually. You’re going to be just fine, Alex. And your mom’s going to be fine, too. Stop worrying so much. Who’s my girl?”

  “I am,” she said, smiling up at him.

  “And don’t you ever forget it,” he said, holding her tighter.

  Now her mother, sitting still as a widow, seemed emptied out of tears. For this moment at least. Alex got up and moved around the table, put her arms around her neck, rested her face against her smooth strong-boned cheek. “I love you very much,” she said fiercely. At this moment she hated her father very much.

  Her mom let out a little ragged breath, patted Alex’s skin. “I’ll be fine, honey. I’m just in a bit of shock. This has all been such a surprise.”

  Alex went up to her room and sat on the edge of her bed. What would Grandpa think about all this? From her bedside drawer she took out a fresh sheet of notepaper and a pen and started to write.

  Dear Grandpa, I’m writing this letter to you even though you’re dead. You once told me that life is full of surprises, and sometimes the good ones and the bad o
nes get all bunched up together. Well, I think this is one of those times. If you are watching over me, like I felt you were that night in the park, the night you died, then I guess by now you know that I dreamed about him dying.

  She gripped her pen. Did she see her father’s face in that dream? He was something of a lone wolf, Mr. LaFrenière’s letter had said, but perhaps you already knew this, and other things about him. Other things? What other things? Her head hurt. She felt cold. She pulled Grandpa’s ratty old blue sweater off the back of her chair and put it on. It still carried the memory of their camping trips and woodsmoke. She continued to write:

  He’s left me land in the country, Grandpa. And a cabin. And seventeen thousand dollars. That’s one thousand dollars for every year of my life. Every year that he didn’t bother to try and be part of. Can you imagine that? Did he actually plan it this way? Did he really think that this would be some kind of terrific payoff?

  This is a terrible gift. I want it. And I hate it. And I hate him. What am I going to do? Loving you with all my heart, Alex.

  She sat back and folded the letter in four. Then she held a match to it and burned it so that no one else would ever read it, so that the words she had written would become a living secret inside her heart.

  She got off the bed and removed the sweater, her shirt, her jeans. She looked at her hands, her body, her legs in the mirror. She stood there in her cotton underwear and thought, Who is this big, tall person?

  She solemnly reviewed her mother’s long bones and dark eyes, eyes that flew back to her Dene grandmother and then back and back and back, through thousands of unimaginable years on one continent. Then she reviewed Auntie Francine’s smooth nose and pretty lips. And then her own hair; neither her mom nor her aunt had hair this color. Grandpa once called it buffalo hair.

  “Buffalo hair? That’s not very flattering, Grandpa.”

  They were in a boat in the middle of deep, mesmerizing, well-named Spirit Lake. She cast off a line, hoping for a big fish, and Grandpa said, “The buffalo has a beautiful dark reddish brown coat. Same color as your hair. And he’s a powerful animal. Someday you’ll meet somebody. And when you meet him, you’ll think about this day. Because he’ll have the gift of buffalo medicine. Do you know what that is?”