Starlight
Page 1
BOOKS BY RICHARD WAGAMESE
Fiction
Keeper’n Me
The Terrible Summer
A Quality of Light
Dream Wheels
Ragged Company
The Next Sure Thing
Indian Horse
Him Standing
Medicine Walk
Starlight
Non-Fiction
For Joshua
One Native Life
One Story, One Song
Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations
Poetry
Runaway Dreams
Copyright © 2018 Estate of Richard Allen Wagamese Gilkinson
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request
ISBN: 9780771070846
Ebook ISBN 9780771070853
The supplementary texts by Richard Wagamese included in this book—the excerpt from the novella “To Fight No More Forever” (this page), the ceramic heart quotation (this page), and the essay “Finding Father” (this page)—are copyright © 2018 Estate of Richard Allen Wagamese Gilkinson. These texts reprinted with permission courtesy of the Estate of Richard Allen Wagamese Gilkinson.
Book design by Andrew Roberts
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
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Contents
Cover
Books by Richard Wagamese
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue - Nechako Valley, British Columbia - 1976
Book One - Wild Things - 1980
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Book Two - Deer Stalker
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Book Three - Unbroken Country
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
A Note on the Ending
Publisher’s Note
Finding Father
About the Author
STARLIGHT HELD THE URN IN BOTH HANDS. When he got to the porch he scraped the mud from the heels of his boots on the edge of the top step. Behind him the light was frail. The field was awash in low-lying fog that came with the chill, and the line where the bush began was demarcated by the blurred serrated shadow of tree tops pocking the flank of the ridge. The sun hung in the backdrop of cloud like a yellowed eye. He had to hook the doorknob with a finger to pull the door open and push it back with one shoulder to step through. The house was dim and cool and he took care to step out of the boots, nudging them off with the toe of the opposite foot and cradling the urn to his chest.
He carried the urn to the kitchen table and set it in the middle. It was brass. He held his hands against its sweep and curve. “Fancy for you,” he said. “But you were due it.”
He went to the fireplace and spent some time with the kindling and birch logs. When the fire took he held his hands out to warm them. A black iron kettle hung from a tripod and he shook it to gauge its depth of water then arranged the tripod legs to hang the kettle over the fire. He sat there staring at the orange burst of flame. Steam curled off the damp of his ill-fitting black suit and he took the jacket off and flung it over his shoulder toward the old rocker set square to the hearth. He tugged his tie loose and yanked the tails of the stiff white shirt free of his pants and sat with his hands dangled over his knees until the kettle began to whistle and he rose and returned with tea bags he dropped in. Then he went back for the urn, a mug, and a handful of candles. When the tea had steeped he used a thin towel hung on a peg to hold the kettle and fill his mug. Then he walked around the room setting candles here and there and lighting them with a wooden match. Satisfied, he returned to the hearth and sat cross-legged on the floor sipping at the tea and watching the dance of light and shadow on the urn. It seemed to shiver like a live thing stirring.
“God,” he said. “Never knew how much this place needed you to fill her ’til now.”
There was the sting of tears at his eyes and he shook his head to clear them. He’d made it through the funeral without them. Just him, the minister, three local farmers, and a five-woman choir from the church. The old man would have railed at the religiosity, but he’d opted for the ceremony out of a sense of decorum, not knowing for certain what was required or even what was right. But it made him feel in control. As though somehow the one decision gave him a fortitude he lacked. Once the ritual was finished and the farmers eased away like mist across a pasture, he stood in the parking lot, leaning against the wheel well of the pickup. After a time he wandered the town. There wasn’t much to it. But he found memories in many of the places and he stood with his hands in his pockets and he felt better somehow in these dim recollections of him and the old man arranging the stuff of their lives in the slow-motion roll of time on those streets. At the school he’d attended it was as though he could hear the voices of the children and see himself running to the truck and the old man waiting with the passenger door flung open, the smell of it and the feel of his work shirt hard at his cheeks when he hugged him. There were scenes like that everywhere it seemed and he took his time working his way around the town. Then, in the late afternoon he returned to the funeral home and sat in the truck and smoked and waited for the urn to be brought out to him. The funeral director, a pasty rail of a man, bowlegged and quick in his movements like a varmint, handed it to him and nodded.
“Thank you for the service,” he said. “It was nice.”
“It was simple,” the man said. “I liked that.”
“He’da liked it too.”
“Yes. He would have.”
He’d driven around with the urn on the seat beside him. He’d thought to drive to all of the places the old man favoured and play the country music station he’d listen to on the porch in the evenings. But those geographies seemed wrong. The music felt out of place. Eventually he’d driven back to the farm in silence and when the light rain fell, he’d stood out in it watching the play of light across the field, the urn slick against his cold, cramped fingers. Now, the fire chased the stiffness from him and he wiped at his eyes and picked the urn up and cradled it and rocked back and forth, singing ragged and rough the one gospel song the old man had known about a home across a river he’d never seen. He let the tears come finally until he’d cried himself out and then stood and walked to his bedroom and changed his clothes. He stoked the fire and blew out the candles and carried the urn in his arms out across the yard to the barn where the horses stood in the stalls, heads draped over the top rails like paintings of ancestors in a great hall watching the procession of the dead. The old man had loved the barn. Sometimes he’d wander out and find him just sitting in it and he’d join him. The two of them woul
d sit silently and eye the ramshackle lean of it, taking in the smell, the low warmth that came off the animals, the way the light as it shifted came to change the barn’s angles, the wind making it creak as though there were voices in the beams and joists. When he thought of his life on the farm he would always think of those quiet times in the barn; the old man, neck craned, studying it as though seeing it for the first time every time. It seemed to him then that the old man had wanted to pull it deep into himself and he liked to think he had. So he carried the urn into the tack room and cleared a spot on the shelf where bits and bridles and hackamores hung. He set it there. He stepped back and looked at it, not knowing where else to leave it until he could figure out the proper place to scatter the ashes. This seemed a fine honouring. It seemed the proper place for the old man to rest. He wiped at his face with the flat of his palm. He craned his own neck and studied the barn. There were voices in the beams.
* * *
—
He took his time with the cleaning. He rolled up the carpets in the living room and bedroom and hung them over the clothesline and beat them with a broom. He used the same broom to sweep the ceilings and down the edges of each wall. Then he dusted and waxed every surface before he swept the entire house and flung the dirt and dust off the porch. Then he mopped. While the floors dried he sat in the old man’s rocker on the porch and smoked. After a while he rose and washed every dish and pot in the kitchen and set them in the cupboards. There was a box of food he wouldn’t get around to cooking that he left on the porch for the Goodwill folks to pick up along with another that held the old man’s clothes. There wasn’t much. He’d learned frugality and thrift from the old man and they’d only ever had what they needed. There was no surplus. Nothing went unused. Nothing was wasted. The boxes held everything the old man had owned except for the things Starlight had chosen to save. His pipe that he set on its stand beside the kitchen table where he liked it. His rope hackamore, hung on its nail in the mudroom. A pair of boots, shone thin and canted hard at the heels, tucked under the foot of his bed like the old man could rise and step into them. The duster he’d worn when he still rode draped across the saddle set on a tall stool beside the fire.
He walked through the house and made sure everything was in its place and then sat in the old man’s rocker by the fire with his legs stretched out in front of him, staring at the hearth. This rough old house, ramshackle barn, the horses, the cattle, and the eighty acres it sat on were all he’d known his twenty years. The only sound was the ticking of the clock on the hearth. It struck eleven a.m. He rose and walked to the front door and opened it and leaned on the jamb, staring out across the pasture with his hat in his hand. He heard a calf bawling and the sound of hoofs kicked against a stall. There was the hard clap of a rifle to the west and then another. Silence. He heard the house beams shift and he turned and looked into it, the feel of it against his face. When he felt tears he turned and stepped out onto the porch, pulling the door closed behind him and locking it. He’d drop the key at the neighbours. They’d leased the land to work as they wanted. They’d tend to the horses and watch over things while he was gone. He had no idea how long that would be. He pushed the back of the old man’s porch rocker and watched it move back and forth. When it stopped he strode resolutely to the truck, the crunch of gravel echoing off the barn, and he opened the door and stepped up and stood on the running board with one hand on the roof, eyeing the place before climbing in behind the wheel. He drove out of the yard without looking back. When he got to the road he sat there, the truck idling smoothly and his hands gripping the wheel. There were horses in the field across the road. They were lined nose to tail facing into the light breeze that came from the east. The farm was all the world he’d ever known. It felt empty, alien without the old man. There was a whole other world out there beyond the valley the farm sat in. He pondered that. What he knew of the world beyond the farm was the backcountry, the bush, the rock, the rivers. He knew nothing of cities or books or histories beyond the one he’d made here. He’d been of a mind to leave and see some of that outside world. See himself against the context of it, maybe choose something different for himself in the process. With the thrum of the rebuilt motor shimmying the truck some, the idea of himself against the backdrop of that small farm and the shadow of time passed there hung over all of it, so that when he pulled the truck into a tight U-turn and drove back to the house he felt right and contented in re-inhabiting this world.
EMMY AND THE GIRL WATCHED THE ROAD. It was full dark. Mosquitoes whined around their faces and they brushed them off, never taking their eyes from the gravel driveway eked out of the purple darkness like a stain. They counted the cars as they turned out and onto the main gravel road to town. Twelve of them. They waited. After a long unbroken silence she motioned for the girl to rise and led her slowly out of the bush. The girl moved well, never snagging or catching a foot on the underbrush, and Emmy admired the stealth learned from the man in the cabin at the end of that driveway. One thing that was good and strong and would serve her well. They stood at the edge of the road. Wary. Alert to any sound or movement that would send them back into the shelter of the trees. There was nothing.
“Reckon he’s asleep?” the girl asked.
“You hush,” she said.
The girl looked at her wide-eyed, the gleam of them like quicksilver in the murk. She nodded. The man was a deerstalker. He would awake at the push of a faint breath. Except when he was drunk as he would be now but she knew better than to believe in the absolute deadness of drink. She coaxed the girl forward with a fan of her fingers and they crept to the head of the driveway. She stopped and listened. There was nothing and they walked along the edge where the gravel was looser, finer, and where the scrunch of their footfalls would be diminished. Quiet. The burly hump of an owl in a tree. Bats. Mosquitoes and the soft whisper of breeze in the leaves of aspens. Nothing else moved or was heard in that stark quiescence. She found her breath deep in her belly and her mouth opened, each exhalation long and hushed, and the girl was a wraith in the darkness behind her. There was sufficient light for the gravel to be a dim trail wending its way deeper into the maw of bush toward the cabin a half-mile in. They skulked forward.
Eventually the road sprawled open into the yard and she could see the hulks of old cars and trucks and farming equipment the man kept for trade or parts he would sell every now and then. There were ancient implements and bush gear, axes, saws, and pike poles stacked against crates that held turnbuckles or gears or hanks of fatigued rope or hand tools gone weary with rust. It was a sad agglomeration. The air was tainted with the smell of grease and oil and decay. Even the grass seemed to erupt in sporadic twitches like it had to be coaxed outward onto this cheerless flat. The cabin sat beyond it dark as a failed idea, tendrils of smoke from the chimney the only sign of life. The truck was parked at a wild angle with the doors thrown open from when Cadotte and Anderson had lurched out of it, Anderson likely carrying the keg of beer and him toting a crate of vodka, rum, whisky. She signalled the girl to wait and she ducked and waddled to the truck, using it as a screen. The keys were in the ignition as she hoped and she pocketed them in the cheap cotton shift she wore over the work boots laced high on her shins. The girl appeared at her side. She held a finger to her lips and together they crept closer to the porch. They could smell the fire burned down to embers and the scrim of puke and piss and blood that hung on the air.
Cadotte was the man she’d lived with for three years. He was the one she feared the most. He was a brute and he simmered in a palpable silence and stillness that could fill a room with its sweeping malevolence. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man but the sheer bulk of Anderson made him seem tiny in comparison. Anderson existed on the fear his size generated, even in Cadotte. Together they were formidable. They were wild men. The ones they gathered around them were crude and violent, loggerheaded and dim, prone to fist fights and brawls over perceived slights that ended in laughter, hugs, and an indecipherable
bond forged by fury and garrulous talk about women, money, vague dreams, and the accrued gossip that passed for knowledge in men who knew only the integrity of their backs and the erudition of fists.
The yard was littered with thrown bottles, cigarette butts, and plastic cups, and as she edged closer to the porch she could hear the thrum of their snoring. She hoped they were thoroughly drunk and would not wake while she and the girl gathered the things they would need to flee Cadotte and the fallow life he kept them in.
The door opened silently. It had been kicked open in a drunken rage months before and Cadotte had replaced the metal hinges with swaths of rubber tire. She stepped into the front room. It took up half the cabin. The woodstove sat in the middle with a couch set along the one wall. It served as the girl’s bed. Anderson was sprawled there, face down, with one thick arm hung over the edge, a bottle clutched in his hand. His unruly hair was long and covered his face, half of it stuck to his cheek with sweat. She could smell the fecund air of his breath from across the room. The bedroom was at the back and through the open door she could see Cadotte spread-eagled with his head thrown back against a pillow and his mouth gaping open as he snored all ragged and deep so that the bed creaked with the strength of his exhalations. She motioned the girl to stay put on the porch and made her way surreptitiously about the cabin, scooping up small items and a change of clothing for them both and stashing them in a burlap bag hung from a nail in the wall. She handed the bag out the door to the girl, who took it and headed off to stash it in the box of the truck. Emmy took another sack and stuffed in a heel of bread, carrots, two apples, and some jerked meat. It was all there was. What she wanted most was the money.