Bone Dance

by Martha Brooks

  She shook her head.

  “One time, just after your grandmother died, I’d been feeling sad. The doctor gave me pills for my nerves. They made me feel worse. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I was fixated on your grandmother’s image. On the fact that I had lost her. I couldn’t enjoy anything. Not the blue sky. Or my garden. Or the birds singing. All I thought about”—he closed his eyes— ”continually, was what I had lost. Then, one night, I dream about a buffalo. The buffalo is the Creator’s most precious gift to the Native people. And this buffalo is magnificent, except for one thing. It has a lame leg. Well, it limps right up to me and bellows, ‘You!’

  “‘Holy smoke!’ I say, and I jump back about ten feet, but I can still feel its hot, hot breath on my face.”

  “You have a lame leg, Grandpa,” she reminded him.

  “I didn’t.” He looked at her. “Not before I had that dream.” He paused. “But when I wake up, guess what!” He slapped his leg. “A twinge of pain. Right here. Right in that same leg as that lame buffalo.”

  “Grandpa,” she said sternly, “you were imagining things. You have arthritis. Everybody knows that.”

  He shifted in the boat and looked behind him, as if the fish might be listening. Then he leaned forward and whispered, “That buffalo brought me strong medicine. I know it for a fact. I know it as sure and solid as this old blue boat we are sitting in. Unhh-huh. First, I threw away my pills. Then I started to notice things. My garden, that year, grew the biggest potatoes ever. I had such an abundance of potatoes, it made me laugh. And then I began to see your grandmother in your mother and in your aunt. Different little things they’d say and do reminded me of all the gifts of her life. And now I see her in the way you move your hands, little bug. And I feel grateful.”

  He looked away down the lake, and for the first time in her life she thought about the fact that they wouldn’t just go on and on like this forever. Grandfather and granddaughter out fishing in a boat on a lake so quiet that the smallest of sounds became magnified.

  “So how would I know,” she whispered, “when I saw that person? That one who is supposed to have the gift of buffalo medicine.”

  “You’ll know.” With every small movement, the arms of his nylon jacket swished and sang against the side of the boat. “Tell him howdy for me.” He smiled into the water and wiped at a sly tear that betrayed him, one that tumbled down his face. His short silver-and-black hair. His red cap that said Tansi Lumber.

  Water lightly slapped the boat. Suncaps blinded her, and now her heart felt heavy with the weight of his inevitable absence. She was ten years old, and she wanted to say something to make this day better. So she said, like she really believed all this stuff he’d been telling her, “So how do you know it will be a he?”

  “Ahhhh!” he teased, breaking the stillness out on the water. “Did I say ‘he’?”

  In the last six years of his life, Grandpa often spoke like that. As if he knew he wouldn’t be around forever, and it was important that she know that after he was gone, life would still hold a potion for miracles. He wanted her to believe that. If you could just get hold of the formula, you could make something terrific out of everything, and stop yourself from being scared and screwed up and confused.

  “What is this?” he asked one time, rolling in his hand the smooth stone that always sat in the middle of his kitchen table.

  “It’s a stone,” Alex replied, knowing full well that this was a very tricky question.

  Grandpa chuckled and nodded his head.

  The stone sat on his table for years. It didn’t change in all the years she looked at it—round and gray with cloud-colored flecks.

  “A rock can’t have feelings,” she said to him one day as they walked along a trail in the woods behind their tent at Spirit Lake.

  “I see,” he said, swatting at his arm. “Can a mosquito have feelings?”

  “Only if you hit it.”

  “Then it would be dead. It would have no feelings.”

  “Grandpa, if a rock has feelings, then how come you have a captured rock at your house?”

  He laughed and put his hand over his heart and said, “I asked it if it wanted to come home with me.”

  “Ahhh! You didn’t do that!”

  “I did! I asked it!”

  And another day, “A rock can’t tell time,” she told him. “Don’t tell me that a rock can tell time.”

  “It’s smarter than time.”

  “Don’t tell me that!”

  “A simple rock can tell if it’s day or night. Hot or cold. Summer, spring, winter, or fall. And a rock remembers things.”

  “What things?”

  “Things like, for instance, this rock here, sitting on the table. Say it’s time for me to have lunch. Well, while I’m having my tomato-and-cheese sandwich, this rock is remembering that time on the prairie when a buffalo came by and peed on it.”

  Alex laughed and laughed, and thought about this image, and laughed some more. “Grandpa,” she said, giggling, “that’s very rude.”

  “Over here or back there,” he said, “two hundred years ago or today, it’s all the same to a rock.”

  Three weeks before he died, he asked her, “What’s this?” He placed the cold stone in her hand.

  “It’s your rock, Grandpa.”

  “No, it’s yours,” he said, adding, “yours to take care of. And notice how your hand is bigger than it used to be.”

  A rock. A simple rock.

  She picked up the rock that now sat on her desk. She rolled it around in her hand and fingered all the places where it was rough and then smooth.

  “Grandfather,” she said to the rock, “what am I going to do?”

  Then she put down the rock. She dressed again. She calmly phoned Serena and, with all of her dignity, told her about her father dying, about the will, the money, the cabin, and the land.

  “What an unbelievable gift,” said her friend. Her friend since they were both little bugs.

  “I’ll be right over,” Alex told her solemnly. Downstairs, she carefully lifted her coat and scarf from the front-hall hook and strode three and a half blocks down their snowy street to see her.

  Serena, now almost six feet tall, like Alex, and, like her, more curvy than bony, opened the door. She said, “I’m sorry about your dad.” She threw her arms around Alex. “I’m so, so very sorry. I know you never met him, but you wanted to. I know you wanted to.”

  Alex pulled away and shrugged her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “You don’t mean that. Of course it matters.” She led Alex down the hall to her totally pink bedroom. It had a large and wonderful brilliant blue-and-green papier-mâché frog that hung by a cord from the ceiling—Serena’s touch, not her mother’s. “But now,” Serena said, “now at least you have something.”

  “I suppose so,” Alex responded miserably.

  Serena started to laugh, her whole body shaking. “You suppose so? You’re so weird. Who else in my life would react like the world’s coming apart when they’ve just found out that they’re practically an heiress.”

  “It’s too complicated to explain,” said Alex, feeling angry and helpless and guilty.

  “Oh,” said Serena, a little too lightly. “That’s fine. Another time.”

  Alex now was sorry she came over. Sorry she ever told Serena about it.

  6

  Last year, in eleventh grade, she and Serena had had that falling out. It was a couple of months after Grandpa’s death. And, she could now admit, it was over something really stupid. The rock held a place of honor in her heart, but there had been many other things once belonging to Grandpa that she had latched on to.

  Serena had borrowed his pen, now Alex’s, and lost it. And it was just a pen, after all. One of those cheap drugstore ones that would have run out of ink after about three months. Yet she couldn’t believe how angry she felt when Serena casually told her that it had been lost.

  “I guess it fell ou
t of my bag,” she said. “My God, Alex, we’re not talking about a religious relic. It was just an ordinary pen.”

  “It was his pen,” said Alex icily, “that he wrote with. He wrote his last grocery list with that pen.”

  “Grocery list?” Serena wrinkled up her pretty nose. “Did you keep that, too?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Alex, angrily turning away, shoving books, papers, binders into her backpack. The grocery list, in a very shaky hand, said bananas, eggs, six muffins. It was still pressed between the pages of the last paperback book he ever read.

  Serena heaved a big sigh. “When are you going to stop all this crazy stuff and get on with your life?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I can’t talk to you,” said Serena. “And you obviously don’t want to talk to me, so I’m out of here.”

  “Fine,” said Alex. “That’s absolutely fine with me.”

  They didn’t talk to each other for three months. And then Serena came back into her life. She arrived at her front door with an apology in the form of a bottle of cola, a bag of chocolate creams, and a double-cheese pizza.

  And they never again talked about the pen.

  7

  They were colorless and odorless. Lonny sensed them pressing against his bedroom window. Or standing in the darkest part of his room. Once, before waking up, he felt something heavy on his chest. When he opened his eyes, he discovered that he couldn’t move. Not his arms or legs or even his head. He lay there, pinned by their weight. Sometimes he felt as if a column of darkness had entered his body.

  He was eleven years old.

  Pop asked, “Are you sad?”

  Of course I’m sad. I’ve killed my mother.

  Pop would sit like a lost man at the edge of Lonny’s bed, a sandwich in his big hand. It would drip ketchup onto the floor, and neither of them would bother to clean it up.

  Whenever Lonny thought back to that time, the image of Pop and his sad midnight sandwiches haunted his memory. That, and the ghosts of the Ancients that lurked between the smells of burned toast and unwashed clothing and growing dust. They were silent when he was awake. But he grew to be afraid of sleeping.

  He would hear water gurgling. He’d stand, in his dreams, on the LaFrenière homestead, a place he’d stopped visiting in his waking life. At his feet, an old spring would bubble up, the water trickling through a clearing in the woods all the way down to the lake. He’d drop down and lie on his stomach and drink thirstily from the spring, from the golden water that came from its source deep in the dark earth.

  But always their voices came in the wind, pulling him away from some unnamed longing. “Sorrowwww,” they whispered through the pretty poplar leaves.

  When Lonny turned twelve, the ghosts went away. He wasn’t exactly sure what made them do that. He woke up one morning and was aware of a happy feeling for no special reason.

  “Did you sleep well, son?” Pop asked, pouring hot chocolate out of a battered pot into Lonny’s mug.

  “Yep, I did.” Lonny bent his head over the mug, slurping the hot liquid. He was trying to remember his dreams of the night before but found that he couldn’t. They were, somehow, blocked. This, he decided, was a good thing.

  The shadowy figures left the house. He imagined them floating back to Medicine Bluff, light and free. Occasionally, with a flicker, like a match struck in a moonless room, he thought about them and panicked. But he found that he could then push them away. Lock them out. And dream of nothing in particular.

  Earl’s death shook him. The dreams began full force again, but different this time. Always it was his mother, coming to him again and again in his dreams. She became less human and more spirit. She’d land delicately at the side of his bed, all snow and ice and feathery white fringes. She’d blow on his face as if she were the north wind. She would whisper, “Let the spirits dance. The land will wake up and tell you things.”

  What things? he asked with his mind. Every single time, he’d wake up to find himself as immobilized as that rusty snow-mounded wagon wheel that rested against the shed outside in the January darkness.

  He tried talking to Robert about his dreams. Robert sitting in the cafeteria, his head full of hockey scores and daydreams of Tammy Martel, who still wouldn’t sleep with him even though she’d done it with just about everybody else, Lonny included.

  “What?” he said when Lonny was in midstream, middream. Then he laughed nervously. “That’s weird shit, man.”

  “Yeah, weird.” Lonny laughed, too.

  After that, day after day went by with Robert talking on and on about nothing. Lonny let him talk and could tell that he was relieved no mention was made of his mother’s spirit again.

  He sleepwalked through his days, nudged by dreams, getting A’s and B’s with his mind half-awake. His English teacher, Miss Samson, handed him a paper he’d done on a poem by Dylan Thomas. “Good work, once again, Mr. LaFrenière,” she said, and then frowned at the bags under his eyes. “I hope you’re planning on going to university next year.”

  At the beginning of February, Robert said he was bored. “Everybody’s bored, Lon,” he said, “and that’s because it’s winter. And so we’ve got to do something about it.”

  He suggested they round up some Ski-Doos and a few people and go down to the old LaFrenière place and have a party. “Come on, Lon,” he urged. “You’ve been all weird lately. And you need cheering up. And I’ll bet not a single person has been down there since Earl kicked the bucket. So what’ll it hurt?”

  “I don’t want to go down there,” said Lonny.

  But Robert wasn’t listening, and he was so fired up, there was no stopping him. A couple of days later, people were coming up to Lonny in the halls at school. By Saturday night, nineteen people showed up at the top of the snowed-in trail, piling out of cars, unloading snowmobiles off the backs of family trucks. They showed up with cases of beer, tequila, gin, and cheap wine. It was fiercely cold, and the snow was waist deep in places. A caravan of lights wound down through the bush, everybody yelling and laughing past dark, silent winter trees.

  At Earl’s cabin, Tyler Lakusta, giggling like he was already drunk, pulled off his leather mitt, fumbled under his jacket and layers of sweaters for his wallet. While somebody shone a flashlight, he used his bank card to gentle the lock on Earl’s door. It was easy. And it was wrong.

  Charlene McLean had brought candles, and she pulled off her boots at the door and told people they had to wait outside until they were lit. And when they finally did go in, it felt as if they were entering a church, candlelight flickering up the walls. Lonny half expected to see Earl laid out in a coffin in a suit even though he’d been cremated last month.

  Charlene, her thick black hair hanging down her back in a single braid, opened her arms up wide and threw them around Lonny and yelled, “Surprise!”

  And then everybody sang “Happy Birthday,” and all he could do was stand there, stunned, because his eighteenth birthday wasn’t until next week, but this was his party, obviously, and Robert had planned it all.

  Later as the woodstove and all the bodies inside heated the cabin up, people got loud and drunk. Robert and John Tessier and Curt Mason and Morgen Thiessen staggered outside and stood in a snowdrift and pulled down their pants and mooned the moon. Tyler lured Marianne Neufeld off to Earl’s bedroom, where she threw up in his lap.

  Charlene came and sat beside Lonny on the living-room floor. She offered him a cold marshmallow from a bag she’d ripped open with her teeth.

  “Hey, Charlene,” he said softly.

  “Hey, Lon. Are you having a good time?”

  He shivered and looked at her glowing face. He’d known her ever since they were in second grade. All of them, all of the girls—Charlene, and Tammy Martel and Marianne Neufeld and Sherry-Lynne Baker and Jen “the Bird” Nightingale—had gone from wide-eyed seven-year-olds into golden-lidded women, it seemed, overnight. And now they seemed like strangers.

  “Thanks
for the candles,” he said. “They look nice.”

  She drew a circle in the dust on Earl’s floor. She turned to him, her warm eyes drawing him in. “You into this stuff?” And she went on, “Circle of life? Medicine wheels? Some eternal plan?”

  “Not me.” He smiled. “I’m just a bad godless boy. But my mom was. She had a gift for life. She could even see light… on trees.”

  “You mean like their auras?”

  “I guess. Man, am I drunk,” he went on, embarrassed.

  “No, you’re not,” said Charlene.

  He shrugged. “People think you’re a fruit loop when you talk about stuff like that.”

  “Lonny”—Charlene put her arm around him, resting her head on his shoulder—“don’t you know what people think of you?”

  He laughed. “What do they think of me, Charlene?”

  “And I’m not including your girlfriends now,” she said. “Because, let’s be honest, you’re hell to have as a boyfriend. But you are a great friend. You know that? You listen to people. You make them feel like they could be anything, do anything. That’s a gift. That’s a real gift.”

  “I do that?” he said in amazement.

  “Yeah,” she said, snuggling closer. “Boy, it’s cold. Put your arm around me. Tell me something good.”

  8

  Alex dreamed of snow. A small cabin. A shiny window. Her grandfather’s hand along her back. “Look, Alexandra.” Brilliant snow, brilliant sky. The top of a hill. And suddenly a raven, flying out of the woods, sunlight tipping its wings.

  During the day she sat and doodled black rocks on her purple plastic binder and got memory flashes of her dreams of the night before. Strange dreams. Crackling sticks and coals. The soft plunk of snow hitting the bottom of an iron pot. The rattle of tin cups. Cold lips slurping tea. Soft voices. Clicking tongues. The monotone of a language that was an unfamiliar landscape—her grandfather and someone else. Inside her mind, inside her sleepy mind, she was an animal, curled in warm furred sleep, listening to the blizzard outside batter and whine against the cabin door.