“I want you to read it,” she went on coldly, handing it over to him. “I want you to read every damn word. And then I want you to go away. I want you to get in your truck and get the hell away from me.”
She turned her back on him and walked away. Walked imperiously around to the side. Walked like goddamn royalty up the cabin steps and slammed the door.
With a sickened heart, he began Earl’s letter, forcing himself to read it with more attention than he’d given anything he’d read in a long time. And as he read, he realized that nobody knew Earl. Nobody ever had. He was at the end of his life when he wrote this letter. And he’d wanted at least his daughter to understand him. And to forgive him.
He quietly walked around the side of the cabin, went into the kitchen. He could see through to the living room, could see her perfect feet sticking out over the end of the sofa. He walked in. Her hair peeked, turtlelike, up over the collar of a weathered brown leather jacket that he recognized. Earl had worn that jacket.
“Alexandra,” he said softly, putting down the letter on the little table beside the sofa. He wanted to tell her the rest of his story. He wanted her to know that he had had those same kinds of dreams, too, just like her, dogging his ass, haunting his days, bringing him to his knees.
She came out from inside her father’s jacket. She unzipped it and opened her dark eyes and looked unwaveringly up at him. Then she pulled the fur collar up to her cheeks and closed her eyes again. Closed them tight.
He could tell that she was praying to see her father. He knew her. He knew how she would lie there, stretched out, a ball of tension slowly rising up her body. How she would be pressed by ghosts and dreams and the weight of her own incomprehensible longing. And that she would wait for whatever time it took. Wait for Earl McKay to materialize in the white sunlight that was spiraling through the window onto her eyelids.
He tore along the road. The LaFrenière land, the land that he could hardly remember not knowing, was now a speck no bigger than a fly’s eye in the blue of heaven.
He jammed on the brakes, then pumped them. The truck slid dangerously, back end grinding over the gravel, and came to a halt. He got out. Slammed the door. Walked down the road. Felt trapped under the prairie sky. Grabbed up a handful of gravel. Hurled it at the horizon. Ran and yelled until his lungs burned to almost bursting. Then he stopped, bending over the road, gasping for breath, and turned around.
Back near the truck, he sank down at the side of the road, sitting in a tight ball, arms locked around his knees, staring into the ditch. Until he heard another vehicle coming along. Saw it trailing dust down the road. He quickly leaped up, dusting off his jeans. Walked nonchalantly back to the truck.
The driver slowed, just as he’d thought he would. You couldn’t ever do anything on these roads without someone coming along, asking if you needed help, about how Pop was, wanting to discuss their crops, their kids, their wives, bingo night at the Legion Hall in town, the latest doings of some neighbor.
He gave a small firm country wave. Kicked at a tire like he was testing it. Got back in the truck and lurched away before he had to stop and talk.
“Thought you were supposed to be at work today,” said Pop when he got back. “Too busy chasing that little girl around Earl’s place, I guess.”
Earl’s place. The blood pulsed in his ears. He went and got the ax out of the shed and started chopping wood. Each log that split cleanly down the middle was one log further away from her. Away from the ghosts. Away from everything.
Pop sat down to watch him. Wood chips blasted everywhere. Lonny didn’t stop until he’d counted up twenty-nine split logs.
“Working up quite a sweat,” Pop observed mildly. “What demon’s got at your back today, son?”
“None,” said Lonny, throwing another log onto the growing heap.
“Something’s lit your tail, that’s for sure. Wouldn’t have anything to do with Earl’s daughter, would it?” he pressed. “I wish you good luck with her, son. I wouldn’t be saying this to you but for the fact that there’s something about her that’s real special.” Pop got up then, pushed around a few wood chips with his toe, and wandered off.
Lonny heaved another log onto the block, took a deep breath, and swung the ax again. He was fed up with dead people. He wanted to live his life and fall in love and be a good person instead of always feeling like shit. Like nothing would ever be right.
17
When she couldn’t see him behind her closed eyes, when finally all she sensed in the sunny room were her own heartbeats rising up and out of her body like invisible birds, she sat up to read his letter again. She perched his photograph against the green stone candleholder and then from time to time lifted her eyes from his words to look at his flat image. She tried to imagine him younger. Maybe his hair had once been the same color as hers. But the picture showed a washed-out grizzled quality, a kind of undefinable yellowish gray. She tried to connect with the eyes, the angry look, of this father who was sending her “probably too late, all of my love.”
She lay back and shut her eyes again. And then something touched her shoulder. It was the steadying memory of Grandpa’s warm hand. And once again, she was nine years old.
They would be out on Spirit Lake in the boat all day long so that, coming back onto solid land, she could still feel the watery rocking motion. Grandpa would follow her, weaving on her feet, as they walked up the path to their tent. Always, at some point, his hand would come to rest on her shoulder.
At night, as they bedded down, and she closed her eyes, their tent became a boat, rocking, rocking, rocking on the water. “Breathe deep,” Grandpa would say in the darkness. He’d open the tent flap to the dazzling Milky Way. “Look! Those are the ancestors up there. Maybe you can even see your grandmother’s face in one of those beautiful stars.”
She’d look up into the vast cosmos, which also made her dizzy. But in the end it was the stars that balanced the rocking motion. A few hours later she’d wake up feeling calm, and the tent flap would be closed, and Grandpa would be snoring, and she would snuggle, like a cozy worm, close to the earth in her sleeping bag.
Alex sat up and looked at the brown sleeves of her father’s jacket, looked at her own hands emerging from the cuffs. He had once been inside this jacket. She tried to feel his memory. Instantly, she felt sick.
I decided after a particularly bad drinking binge that I had to leave town.… I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that I reformed and started on a life of sobriety.…
The cabin walls undulated with the shadows of trees. She stood up and lurched across the living-room floor. Opening the front door, she eased down into the long grasses. For a moment she thought that she might throw up. She wondered how often he had felt that way. How many years had he been an alcoholic? She stood and wobbled toward the lake shore.
But, once again, she felt the steadying pressure of Grandpa’s hand on her shoulder. She stopped and looked up, breathing deeply, pulling blue sky like a vapor into her body. Then, more balanced and surefooted, she turned south on the land.
Her cotton socks poking up out of brown boots with red laces. Red willow branches slapping past her arms. Her pale jeans with the frayed cuffs. The bluish green lichen on black oak trunks.
After a short distance, in a clearing, she crouched low to the earth. She watched the way the sun filtered through the white poplars past her shoulder. She watched the way all the little green plants poked up and through every dead thing. The way the wet ground glistened where a little trickle of golden water came seeping up through it, then went sliding down past the trees to the lake. She watched a small frog with yellow eyes sit in a sleepy froggy daydream not more than a foot away. She slowly reached out her hand and eased a finger under one silky cool frog toe and thought that this was true magic. They could have been shaking hands, and all it did was blink.
She was now aware of the squeaking poetry of her father’s leather jacket, of how it must have sounded to his own ears,
of how he must have felt on good days.
I think that you would like this place I bought …
And then she heard what she thought he might have wanted her to hear. First came the buzzing of one wild bee, then the sweet whisper of leaves. A cow lowed very far away. The hum of crickets, the drumming beak of the woodpecker, the sucking sound of heels in mossy mud. Sound of lapping waves on stone, sound of beetle legs on crispy leaf, sound of blood pulsing in ear, sound past silence, sound past sunlight, smell past sunlight, taste past sunlight, taste of ecstasy.
18
Deena sat across from him, in a booth at the back of the deli, her blue eyes smudged with mascara and fatigue. She squinted through the smoke she inhaled from her cigarette.
“I know,” she said. “I know, I know, I have to quit.”
She stabbed out the glowing end in the tin ashtray and pushed it over beside the ketchup and the napkin dispenser. “When your mom was alive, I thought about quitting even before she did. After she died, I abused tobacco even more. Now, that’s stupid, isn’t it.” She reached across the booth and took his hand. “You didn’t just come in here for a burger. You haven’t touched it.”
He didn’t know where to begin. Didn’t know how to cut through the years of not speaking his mind. He looked at her fingers curled tightly with his. Remembered Tammy’s hands and Jen’s hands and his own carelessness with them and the land and the people he most loved.
“Deena,” he said, pulling away, “what do you do when you feel so lonely even your teeth ache?”
“I don’t know, sweetie. You are asking the queen of loneliness.”
“How come. You and Pop. Never. You know.”
“Oh, that.” She blushed right up past her freckled neck and into her wiry blond hairline. “I thought there was a spark… you know… that was after, after your mom died. But he was too cut up, and I guess I was too set in my ways.”
She let those half-truths hang around in the air for a while. He watched as she lit up another cigarette.
“I love you, Deena,” he said softly, feeling his heart crumble in a million pieces in front of her. “I always have, and I just thought I should tell you that. You know, I sometimes think we don’t tell people stuff. Until it’s too late.”
Deena spoke right into his face. “Tell me what’s resting so heavy inside you. You have to say it out loud, Lonny.”
He picked up the pepper shaker, rolled it between his hands, set it carefully down on the table again. He remembered his mother’s hair, the way it rested around her in the coffin. The way her face hadn’t looked like her face, the way her hands, the delicate bones in each finger, looked like somebody else’s hands, the way he felt, as if he were swimming in grief, seeing her eyes closed, the lashes resting against her cheeks, and Pop’s warm arm around him, leading him away, and the priest in his robes with his brown shoes that had mud on one toe.
“You’ve never wanted to talk to me about her,” Deena said, reading his mind. “You’ve always had these walls around you. I felt like I shouldn’t pry. Maybe I was scared to. Scared of what I might find. Everybody’s a coward, you know. We all just have different things that keep us awake at night.”
Lonny’s heart lurched. “I’m doing the best I can. I don’t know how else to do what I’ve been doing. I don’t know where else to turn. That’s why I came in here tonight. You know that property of ours that got bought up? Well, the girl who owns it now is out there, on the land, and she’s mad as hell at me. And I’m scared to have her be there by herself. I just know that something bad is going to happen to her.”
“Something bad?” Deena sucked on her cigarette, stabbed it out, breaking it in two, peered fiercely at him.
He blurted out, “It’s my fault that Mom died.”
“Lonny,” she said carefully, leaning forward, “little kids make up all kinds of dumb stuff in their heads. They think that they’re magicians. Like just by closing their eyes and wishing stuff, they can make terrible things happen. But you know that isn’t true. You’re all grown up now. You know there is no such thing as terrible magic.”
“Could have fooled me,” he said, shivering. “Goddammit, I’m cold, Deena. You’ve got the air-conditioning turned way up in this place again.”
“Stay right where you are. Don’t you move.”
It was eleven o’clock at night. Deena got up and hurried out her last customer, old Donald Finnbogason, always the first one there in the morning and the last one to leave. Then she stuck her head in the back and told everybody to go home, that she’d wash up, finish up, do the cash. After that she locked the front door. Moved the red-and-black cardboard sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED. She came back with a piece of pumpkin pie with whipped cream and a cup of hot black coffee, set these in front of Lonny, picked up his cold untouched burger plate and sent it sliding down the opposite counter.
She sat down across from him again. “Lonny, if I ever loved a kid, it’s you. And I think that I have failed you badly. And that’s why we are going to sit here, right into next week if we have to. You have my total and undivided attention.”
He could see his mother now as if she were standing right beside them. The pink sweater she often wore. Her fingernails perfect elongated moons. The way her feet slid along the floor when she was tired. The matter-of-fact way she went about doing everything. And when she was angry, a small gesture—a magazine sliding onto the floor, an icy shake of the head, a word, a look—everything about the way she moved, a slow economy of efficient energy. So many things about her that he had forgotten began to rush back.
“Start talking,” said Deena, “and don’t leave out a thing.”
19
At five o’clock in the morning, the red dawn rose beyond the big east-facing windows of Deena’s Deli. His mother’s spirit had eased herself in beside Deena, and Lonny knew that he was seeing things again. Her face was turned so that he could clearly see the way her fine black hair always escaped and fell across her ear no matter how many times she tried to clip it back.
Deena looked across at him and said, “We need to pack it up here. I can’t keep awake much longer. You didn’t even eat your pie. So”—she gave Lonny a wan smile—”you’re going to set your heart at ease finally and go and talk to him.”
He got up out of the booth, went around, and pulled her, dog tired, up out of her seat. She leaned against him, and he clung to her, trembling.
“It’ll be okay,” she said, stroking his back. “Go on now.”
“Deena,” he whispered in her ear, “I know Mom wouldn’t want you to give up on Pop.”
And then he was in the truck, driving away, one hand on the steering wheel, the other, for courage, on the cracked red vinyl seat, the very edge of it, where, drawn in ballpoint ink by himself one day when he was fourteen and bored and missing Mom, was a tiny blue heart pierced with an arrow.
“I’m going to put the coffee on, Pop,” he said when he got home. “I’ve got something I have to tell you.”
Pop rolled over in his bed and rubbed his eyes. “You were out again all night,” he said. “I wish you’d give a fellow some warning. So I wouldn’t always have to be lying here in the middle of the night, worrying about you.”
“Please,” said Lonny, “come on out to the kitchen. Get up now, because I really need you to do that.”
He made coffee, and Pop came and sat down, and then Lonny told him everything. And when it was all finished, when everything was finally all out in the open, Pop sat there stunned, leaning forward, and said, “All this time…?”
Lonny didn’t trust himself to answer. He nodded his head and stared at Pop and couldn’t take his eyes away. It was like looking at hope coming up over the horizon.
“I thought… the LaFrenière land… That’s why you didn’t want it?”
Lonny nodded again and felt a gasp shake his body.
Pop dropped his head, wiped his eyes. “I was so busy with my own grief.”
“I’m so sorry, P
op.”
Pop raised his eyes. “Why couldn’t you have told me?”
“She said it would kill you.”
“Who said that? Your mother?”
“She died feeling disappointed in me.”
“My God,” said Pop.
He got up quickly and came to Lonny and wrapped his arms around him just like a big sheltering tree. “There, there,” he said as Lonny wept and clung to him. “There, there,” he said, awkwardly kissing the top of Lonny’s head. “You don’t have to keep suffering, son. It’s over now. I forgive you.”
Lonny nodded, pulled away, choked back his sobs. But more tears kept coming. Finally, he threw back his head in his chair and wept uncontrollably.
Pop kept on talking, whether out of relief or concern, Lonny wasn’t sure, but his words rippled along like rain. And then Lonny stopped crying, and for the first time since he could remember, he felt calm.
“The year before I met your mother,” Pop was saying, “I went over Dinlaren way. There’s an elder over there by the name of Joe Dakotah, and he runs a sweat lodge. Anyway, I went there to be purified and find some meaning to my life, and right in the middle of all that praying and chanting, I get the idea for that newspaper ad, looking for a companion. And, by gum, didn’t it work out pretty good, too. I found you and my Margaret. A little prayer sitting right next to Mother Earth never hurts when you have a troubled heart. Would you like me to arrange for you to meet Joe?”
“I already have,” said Lonny, wiping his eyes. “Two nights ago. He was over at Robert’s, talking to Daryl. He’s a scary guy. He makes you see the truth.”
“That’s good then. Very, very good.” Pop slowly nodded his shaggy bear head.
Lonny hung his own head, looked at his hands, raised them, and covered his eyes. He was so tired, bone weary. Light gathered like kinks of electricity. A buffalo walked across his vision. Left to right. Disappeared. Walked around behind his head and slowly began to cross again.
Bone Dance Page 11
