“Will you do me a favor?” said Pop.
Lonny opened his eyes. “Anything, Pop.”
“It’s about Earl. I figured his daughter should have the choice of doing what she wants with her father’s ashes.”
“You’ve kept them all this time?”
“Was I wrong to do that?” said Pop.
“No. I guess you did whatever you thought you should do.”
“He wanted the cheap urn. A little white cardboard box. I worried about that. What the family might think. ‘But anything extra,’ he told me a couple of days before he died, ‘anything extra off this old buffalo is fat that I want my daughter to have.’ So I said, ‘Okay, Earl, the cheap urn it is.’ “
Lonny shook his head and smiled.
“And then he says, ‘Ever see human ashes?’ ‘Well, no, I haven’t,’ I tell him. ‘They’re heavy,’ he says. ‘Got little pieces of bone and teeth in them. So make sure they pretty them up, okay?’ ‘What exactly do you mean?’ I say. ‘Well,’ says Earl, ‘you know, she’ll just look at them and get real turned off. People,’ he says, ‘have this idea of spreading them. Know what I mean? So, Tom,’ he says, looking at me with his eyes, and they’re all burning up with pneumonia, ‘we have to be practical, okay? For her sake? So could you ask them, please, to put them in a grinder?’ “
“You did that?”
“It was a dying man’s wish. You can say what you want about Earl, but when he was sober, he did have this very down-to-earth personal side.” Hands on his knees, levering himself out of his chair, he said, “They’re out in the shed. I’ll go get them. I think you should be the one to give them to her. You need to go back and make your peace with her and the land.”
“Pop, she doesn’t even want to talk to me.”
“We’ll see about that. Go and clean yourself up now. You look like you’ve been sleeping in a swamp.”
Twenty minutes later, opening the truck door, Pop set the little white cardboard box on the seat beside Lonny. “Well, Earl,” he said, addressing the box, “looks like you’re finally going to meet your daughter.”
He closed the door, leaned into the open window. “You’re going to be okay,” he said, this time to Lonny. He pulled back and slapped the side of the truck.
Lonny drove away, stealing glances in the rearview mirror. Pop raising his hand, waving. Pop dropping his hand, lowering his head, lost in a private moment. Pop looking at the sky. And as he slowly turned, then walked back toward the empty house, Lonny understood that Pop would be okay, too.
20
She gave up, disappointed, and put down the phone. She opened the refrigerator, pulled out a box of orange juice, a bag of bagels, a tub of cream cheese. She had wanted to tell her mother about how she’d come back from the clearing, dazzled, cleaned out in her spirit. How she then lay on the sofa with all the windows and doors open and her head so filled with sounds, growing sounds, frogs everywhere. “He’s here! And here! And here!” they sang as they leaped in light. Leaped in shade. Trilled from trees. From under rocks. From up on top of the mound.
She’d intended, later, to go out naked under the stars, just as he had done, with only her quilt wrapped around her. And she would have stayed out all night, too. But she fell asleep right there, in the fullness of day, in this cabin, on this land that had somehow become saturated with her father’s life. She didn’t dream except for the clear green froggy light that glowed, then gradually dimmed, behind her closed eyes.
And then she slept through the night. She knew that as she slept the moon had changed position in the sky. And the stars, flung across the vast prairie cathedral, beamed their steady memory of light. They were all up there now, her grandmother and Grandpa and her dad, every one of them taking their place with the ancestors.
She went out to eat breakfast on the steps outside the kitchen. Under the early morning sun, she flipped off the cream-cheese lid. The moan of the LaFrenières’ truck sounded at the top of the road. Grew closer. Her heart began to pound high in her throat as Lonny pulled onto the land. By the time he got out of the truck, her mouth had gone dry. Her top lip stuck to her teeth. Her legs were weak.
Lonny stopped and stood silently in the grass. She folded her arms and felt his eyes looking at her.
“It seems,” he said, “I’m always bringing you things that are really tough to give. And are even tougher to receive.”
She raised her eyes. He walked toward her. Nestled in his palms was a small white box. He climbed up the little steps and sat down beside her.
“What’s this?”
“Your dad’s ashes.”
“Oh,” she said, and then felt as if she were plunging headlong into deep dark water.
He set the box down. “Pop figured that you’d know what you wanted to do with them. He wanted me to bring them to you.”
He sat quietly, perched at the edge of the step. Looking at his feet. Glancing at hers. Waiting.
And then he started talking quietly. “Your dad had been drinking pretty steady since Christmas, and he was drunk when he got to our house. He’d walked all that way, in a blizzard, just so we’d get that letter and mail it for him. But even if I’d mailed it right away, I don’t know if you’d have met him in time. He got sick right after that. He was in the hospital five days later. He never came out again.”
She looked down at the lake. This was a view her father would have looked at again and again in the short time he was here. Did it bring him comfort? Everything was so complicated in this life. It’s just like Grandpa had always said, always the good and the bad together.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” Lonny said finally. “Let’s go down to the lake. It’s nice there. You can see little minnows swimming. The water is full of life this time of year.”
She walked ahead. A big gray rock edged the shoreline. There was room for two or more, and she sat down and Lonny sat near her. They stared out at the water. The sun warmed her shoulders. She ran her fingers along the sun-heated rock, and she could feel the warmth of his body close by.
“I didn’t know who to be mad at,” she finally said. “Life is so unfair sometimes.” She turned to him. “It’s a wonderful letter. I’m glad you kept it. I’m glad you didn’t throw it out.”
“I should have sent it,” he said quickly. “I know that now.”
Do something, she thought. Or was it her thought? In a few minutes he’ll drive away, said this thought, and you’ll be alone again. With your father’s ashes.
All it takes is moving one inch. That’s what makes the difference. Moving your hand just a bit. Making your little finger lift ever so gently toward his. Contact, like lightning bugs.
And suddenly she is in his arms, her mouth against his neck, his sweet hair a curtain around them. His lips, his tongue. Wind blowing off the lake. His beating heart.
21
He felt as if he’d just jumped off a cliff and didn’t know or care where or when he’d hit bottom. He held his fall for a quarter of a century. The world spun many times. This is what it’s like to free-fall into somebody’s heart, he thought. Maybe I’ll die.
She was the first to start breathing again. He held her forehead against his, mentally counted to four, then pulled away.
She had that look that girls get. Even the smartest girls. Like their brains have just left their bodies and won’t be returning anytime real soon. Usually this was a great sign. Today it finally made him want to put on the brakes. Then her vision seemed to clear. He watched her soft look harden into little points of dark darting flame.
“Relax,” he said, feeling shaky and full of crazy love.
“Boy,” she said, her eyes tearing up. She looked out at the lake. “Boy, oh, boy.”
He watched big fat tears flow down her face. Looked away. Felt the way he had that first day when Pop took him up to the top of Medicine Bluff. Felt that joy again. Felt that pulse of rapture go racing like fire along his skin.
“I’ve never met anybody quite like you,�
� he said, looking at her sidelong, sliding his eyes away again.
“Damn right, and don’t you forget it,” she said, swiping at her tears with trembling fingers.
“You make me shaky.” He laughed nervously.
“Is this good or bad?”
He sat there, caught by the wonder of her, imagined her back in a school playground somewhere, hanging upside down from a swing by her scabby knees. Inside her, he thought, is that little person still. And I have to be careful with her. I have to be very, very careful.
22
Gradually, as his story unraveled, as he told it to her, his eyes soft and clear, she understood everything. This is my place now, she was thinking, but he still loves it.
The ghosts of memory swirled around them. And then another story began to unravel. “One winter,” she told him, “I found a sparrow in the snow. It must have flown against the window. Its beak was bleeding, and it had managed to dig itself into a snowbank, and I think maybe it was slowly freezing to death.”
Lonny gazed into the green glinting water. I don’t know him, but I do, she thought. Everything until now, in our lives, has been leading to this moment. She moved closer to him again. Hip to hip, knee to knee. I don’t care about what I should do or shouldn’t do, she thought. This feels right. I like him. And it’s good to feel this fire in my body and to comfort him and to be here with him by this lake.
“I pulled the bird out of the snowbank,” she continued. “I took it into the house and wrapped it in a towel and phoned Grandpa, and he brought over an old birdcage he had at his place. He looked at the sparrow and said, ‘It just needs rest, that’s all.’ And then he eased it into the cage.”
Lonny sat up a little straighter. He lifted his hand and placed his fingers gently on the bone at the back of her neck. Then she sighed and put her head on his chest, and his arm came slowly around her, like a question.
“Well,” said Alex, “we left that sparrow in a dark room, and in a couple of hours it started hopping around the cage. I gave it some chopped-up pecans, and it ate those. And then it started to flutter around, clinging to the metal sides. ‘It’s ready to go now,’ Grandpa said. But I wasn’t ready yet to let it go. It was freezing outside. How would it survive?”
Lonny put his other arm around her, hugging her, tenderly stroking the flesh below her sleeve.
“‘Sparrows are tough,’ Grandpa said. And then he waited, like always, for me to make up my mind. The sparrow was getting desperate. Beating its wings against the silver bars. It was awful. And I felt, I don’t know, sick, I guess. Finally I put my hand in the cage and captured it. It bit me. It was strong. Its thoughts were already out there in the cold north wind. It bit me again before I could get it through the open window. And then it flew out over the snow. Grandpa said, ‘Someday after I’m gone, you’ll think about this day.’”
For a long time she and Lonny lingered there, by the lake. Some people, she was thinking, don’t ever get to know how wonderful it is to do something so simple as this. Just sitting side by side, together, on a big sunny rock.
23
Under the blue starry night he sat on Earl’s steps and waited for her. There were ancient whisperings in the cosmos. The full moon shone in a beautiful way on the abandoned LaFrenière cabin, on its soft silvery wood. This is what I’ve learned about waiting, he thought. If you wait with all of your senses, you don’t wait empty.
And then light from Earl’s kitchen flooded in behind him. She came out, wrapped in a long quilt, her hair gleaming down her back like the sheen of an animal diving under water.
They walked up together. Medicine Bluff irradiated a smoky haze. Halfway up, poplar leaves clicked, old women’s tongues. Near the crest of the hill, she turned. Cradled in her arms, glowing with moon, were her father’s ashes.
She opened the box and set it down on the sagesmelling land. In the space of four heartbeats, her left hand came away, pale with the powder of her father’s bones. She made a fist, held it high, danced in a circle, threw back her head, and howled like a wolf.
He watched as she released Earl McKay’s ashes. Some scattered down the hill. The rest flew like a blessing over a large scar of dark green and were carried away on the strong night winds.
acknowledgments
This book owes its being to many rich sources, not the least of which is the spirit of the land that whispered to me all through my lucky freewheeling childhood in nature.
A huge debt of gratitude is due the First Nations people as a whole, those female and male voices who speak their passionate worldwide warrior truth.
There are, as well, certain individuals I wish to thank for their loving and generous participation in the journey: Brian Brooks, Maureen Hunter, Margaret Shaw-MacKinnon, Jean Karl, Judy V. Wilson, Dominic Barth, Patsy Aldana, Shelley Tanaka, Melanie Kroupa, Mary Kate McDonald, Laara Fitznor, Virginia Maracle, Sidura Lud-wig, Beth Burrows, Todd Schaus, Brock Adams, Sonny Clarke, Gary Granzberg, Delia Dewart, George Toles, Alice Drader, Pauline Wood Steiman, Mona Lynne Howden, David Stewart, and my friends at Red Willow Lodge— Jules and Margaret Lavallee, Betty Rodway, and Gerry Scharien— migwitch, you guys. I’ll always remember that the mosquitoes leave at exactly 11:26 at night.
The Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council, always there for artists in this country, once again came through with greatly appreciated and generous funding.
Last, and most humbly, I want to honor the spirits of the ancestors who guided my waking visions and nighttime dreams and never once gave up on this willing but frequently dense translator.
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