Starlight

by Richard Wagamese

  So Calgary became Edmonton. One lucid morning they accepted two weeks’ labour on an oil rig, where they laid the booze aside and worked hard and savagely to earn enough to carry them through a season of searching. There the twelve-hour days and the camaraderie of working men allowed their rage to fester and they emerged hardened by it, embittered, sore, and hungry for release. In the city they found it.

  Another room and another fire escape above a scrabbled alley on mornings cold as stone. They were huge and brawny and resonant with a sneering disdain for anything beyond the moment they inhabited. They gathered hard men and loose women around them and for a time it almost seemed enough to stultify the gnawing ache of their scars and the acrid memory of heat and flame and blood boiled into floorboards. But it wasn’t. They rose to the flame of vengeance and rancour. They prowled. They sat parked for hours on the strips where pawnshops, panhandlers, hookers, thieves, and boosters ran. They watched the doors of the welfare offices and hostels and the rooming houses where their cadre of friends advised them the fallen and the broken and the beggared started off or ended up. They found the women’s agencies. They trolled schoolyards. Then they looked for men. They searched the Legions where broken, old, and lonesome soldiers went. They found the country bars where the laggard ghost of Hank Williams hunched by a jukebox and scores of sorry stragglers gathered for the twang of heartbreak to assuage their rent and tattered souls. They acquainted themselves with bootleggers and small-bag pushers and anyone with a rough survey of the comings and goings of the street and its people.

  “Why we still doing all this, Jeff?” Anderson asked.

  “You know how to hunt,” Cadotte said.

  “Yeah. And that hooks up to this how?”

  “You become what you hunt.”

  Anderson nodded. “But why’nt we just call the cops and report the truck stolen?”

  “We don’t want no heat around this. Cops get a sniff, suddenly she’s picked up then disappears, you know who gets the first eyeball.”

  “Never thoughta that.”

  “Become what you hunt. Best way of finding what you’re lookin’ for.”

  “What if she changed?”

  “Emmy? She ever feel like she could change when you were humpin’ her?”

  “No. Not likely.”

  “Follow the game trail then.”

  So Edmonton became Red Deer and Lethbridge before they began to circle back toward the coast.

  THE FREEZER ARRIVED FIRST. Roth and Starlight hauled it from town on the flatbed and they installed it at the far end of the mudroom off the porch. They traded a steer for fresh chicken, pork, beef, fish, vegetables, pies, and bread to fill it. The four of them worked together to bag everything properly and for Starlight it was an odd feeling. He’d grown used to taking or buying what he needed when he needed it and the idea of storing and preserving was new and strange. He saw the sense in it. He could determine how it would pay off in leaner times perhaps. But the notion of an appliance was largely lost on him.

  So the washer and the dryer they installed in the crawl space beneath the kitchen did little to clear up his discomfit. The new refrigerator and matching stove altered the kitchen he’d grown used to, as did the new countertop, stainless steel sink, and racks of pots and pans Emmy showed them how to hang from the ceiling. The television they set in the living room changed it completely. The woman and the girl and Roth sat around it and became absorbed by the flickering and changing light and the swell and break of sound. He began to store the old man’s things in his room and the storage room in the equipment shed. The new table lamps and chairs replaced the rocker he took to his room and the equipment catalogues and magazines disappeared quickly and there was an order and a sheen to things that baffled him. She asked for money for household things and he gave it to her and watched as the old house transformed around him, the smell of polish and wax and new rugs and drapes and incense gradually pressing back the oil and grease and man smells he’d lived in all his life so that even his sense of smell was disrupted. The changes were abrupt and he struggled to welcome them. But the back porch remained the same and he took his private time there each evening to sit and rock and muse and smoke and watch the land ease out of its daylight boundaries and into the swaddle of night. It was his haven.

  Emmy found him there one night soon after the last of the purchases had been installed. “Can I join you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said and indicated the rocking chair beside him.

  “Nice night.”

  “Mmm-hmm. I like the quiet. It’s never the same twice.”

  “Not so much quiet since we came.”

  “Always quiet,” he said. “A person’s just gotta wanna find it.”

  “I’m glad I found it. That’s kinda what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “All right.”

  “How did you do what you did? Out there. With the deer.”

  He crushed out his cigarette on the lid of a jam jar and tossed the butt into it before tapping the lid on the rim of the jar and screwing it back on. “I been going to the land alone since I was nine,” he said. “I never recollect bein’ scared out there or lonely or sorrowful. Instead, I always felt evened out, made right kinda. You come to know quiet out there. But we know noise moren’ quiet after a time an’ we figure that’s what’s normal. It ain’t. It’s quiet that’s normal. Animals get that. They never lost it like us. They move in it. They wear it. It’s the normal way of things for them. So after some years I come to understand that if you’re lookin’ for an animal or you wanna know it, you got to be what you seek.”

  He leaned his head back in the chair and stared out at the serrated line of ridge and sky. He looked so intensely that she looked too. There was nothing to be seen but sky.

  “Quiet, you mean.” She said it in a hushed tone.

  “Yeah. You gotta learn to wear it. Move in it. Become it. When you learn how to do that you’re joined to what creatures know and feel and they ain’t scared of you.”

  “That’s when they come to you?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “If that’s your intent. Me? I always just kinda wanna be absorbed into that quiet and pull it into me at the same time. They feel that. That deer was drawn to the quiet. He wasn’t drawn to me. I was just a part of it.”

  “That an Indian thing? A teaching?”

  He looked at her calmly. “I don’t know about Indian things. I wasn’t raised with them. But I come to know the land and how it fills me. I come to know quiet. And I guess, in the end, I come to know something about things like peace and rightness and letting things be.”

  “I never had much to do with quiet,” she said. “My whole life has been about yelling and cussing and hitting and slapping and breaking. Winnie’s too.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” he said.

  “Can you teach us? How to get to that quiet, I mean. We need that. She needs that. I just don’t know how to give it. Or give it so it lasts more’n a few hours anyways.”

  “It ain’t easy,” he said.

  “We already been schooled in difficult.”

  He considered her. She held his gaze. They could hear Roth and Winnie laugh at something on the television. He nodded. “Most of it is unlearning what you come to think you need to know. Gotta unlearn what the world calls normal.”

  “I could do with a heap of unlearning,” she said. “And whatever normal is, I don’t know that I ever seen it. Ever been it. Neither has Winnie.”

  “What you can take and what the girl can take is gonna be different.”

  “I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.”

  “Both of you are gonna feel right uncomfortable.”

  “I’d be surprised if we weren’t.”

  “Lotta stuff won’t make any sense at first.”

  “I’d be surprised if it did.”

  “Whattaya want to know right now?”

  She looked out across the pasture and let her gaze sweep slowly over the line of ridge.
There was the first icy poke of stars in the gathering dark. Cattle kicked the walls of their pens in the barn.

  “When do we start?”

  THE MORNING WAS JUBILANT WITH LIGHT. Emmy rose when she felt him shake her foot and kicked off the blanket and woke the girl, who complained some but rose and followed her sleepy-eyed to the porch, both of them squinting at the hard, brilliant slap of morning. It was chilly and she wanted coffee but he handed them each a cup filled with water and they sat side by side on the edge of the porch and sipped at it, watching him tying moccasins to his feet. They came halfway up his shins. He tucked his pant legs into them then wound a long strand of leather thong around each moccasin and tied them off carefully in a small square knot. They were simple and unadorned. The bottoms were pads of thick felt. He looked up and caught her watching him.

  “You make it through today and I’ll show you how to make your own. You’ll find them better than your city shoes.”

  He stood and shrugged into a pack and looked down at them. Emmy and the girl finished their water and followed him across the yard, around the back of the barn, and across a pasture to a winding two-track road that led into a small copse of trees. They took it through a clearing and when it ended at a loop he walked them into the depths of the trees. He strode purposefully and they struggled to keep up. He handed them each a banana and muffins she’d baked earlier in the week. The terrain rolled irregularly, broken and chunked by boulders, fallen trees, and thickets of blackberry. He walked them up and down a series of hillocks to a creek that seemed to come out of nowhere. Then he stopped and set down the pack and knelt at the water’s edge and cupped a hand and filled it with water and raised it to his mouth and drank. They both mimicked his actions. There were stepping stones in the creek. He walked easily along them and they followed, ungainly and scared. Then he led them back into the wall of trees on the other side. He walked strongly. Winnie alternated between walking and taking little hitch steps and skips to keep up. Their footfalls sounded clangorous, creating small echoes in the trees, and Emmy felt embarrassed. She took to looking at the ground to avoid tripping on rocks and roots and deadfall. They walked a long ways and when he stopped she was sweating and out of breath. Winnie was flushed but appeared game for more. He regarded them calmly. He didn’t show the least effect of the walking.

  “Any idea where the farm is?” he asked.

  “Behind us,” Emmy said.

  “Everything is behind us. Which direction is it?”

  She swept her gaze around and raised a hand and pointed tentatively at an angle behind her. “West?” she asked.

  “That’s actually north,” he said. “We’re walking south and the sun is on your left shoulder. That’s east. West is easy to find when you know that. Do you know how you got here? Where we are right now?”

  “No. I was following you.”

  “What were you looking at?”

  “My feet mostly.”

  “So what would happen if something happened to me?”

  “I’d turn around and walk north with the sun on my right shoulder.”

  He grinned. “That’s good. But if you were looking at your feet you didn’t see the land. You don’t have any landmarks. Why were you concentrating on your feet?”

  “Because I felt like I was thrashing around trying to keep up with you and I didn’t want to make noise.”

  “Did it help?”

  “No. The more I concentrated on making less noise, the slower I walked and the harder it was to keep up. And you’re right. I didn’t see the land.”

  “Or the deer? The porcupine? The horned owl?”

  “Them neither.”

  “I didn’t see them either,” Winnie said.

  He stepped over to her, knelt, and looked at her and smiled. “Well, the trick is that you have to see to walk. Hold your arms out to your sides with your palms up and one finger raised.”

  They both did as he asked. “Can you see your fingers?”

  “A little,” Winnie said.

  “Yes,” Emmy said.

  “That’s okay. As long as you can see them. Now, without moving your head or putting your arms down, tell me what you can see from fingertip to fingertip. Both of you.” He stepped behind them.

  “There’s a rock on my far right,” Emmy said. “It’s got moss on it. There’s a tree right behind it and a bunch of grass all bunched up around the trunk. Then there’s ferns and small trees about five feet high. Beyond them about twenty feet I guess are more trees. Thicker. Denser. Pines. No, wait. Spruce. There’s a lot of ferns about three feet high everywhere. I see a mountain over the tops of the trees.”

  “Me too!” Winnie said excitedly. “I can see all that too!”

  “How much did you see before?” he asked.

  “None of it,” Emmy said.

  “Even when you looked up how much did you see?”

  “Hardly anything.”

  “No wonder it was hard to walk,” he said to Winnie.

  “Yeah. I kept thinking I was gonna trip so I looked down most of the time,” Winnie said.

  “Well, when you practise seein’ everything you don’t have to look at your feet. All of us learn to walk with narrow vision. But out here you can really learn to see and walk. Now do this.”

  He pointed to his feet and angled the toes inward. When he stepped forward he barely lifted the foot, merely sliding it over the ground before setting it down in a rolling motion on the outside edge of his foot, from the heel to the toes. He repeated it with the next step and they watched carefully. He motioned them to follow and they both tried to imitate his motions. It was awkward but they crept along that way and Winnie giggled. It felt cartoonish. At any moment Emmy expected him to turn around and point at her following his furtive creep through the bush and erupt in a huge belly laugh at her expense. But he just kept walking. Her muscles began to ache. The unfamiliar plant and roll of her foot asked her to use leg muscles she didn’t know she had and she felt the pain most sharply along her shins and under her knees but she kept on with it. Eventually he stopped and turned to face her.

  “How did you breathe?” he asked.

  “I don’t even know that I did.”

  “You gotta breathe different. Deeper. Longer. It’ll calm you, ground you, give you better balance. You’re stalking when you do this. I call it my cougar prowl.”

  “I wanna prowl like a cougar,” Winnie said.

  “You just did,” he said. “A long time ago we had to get food from the land. We were hunters. Stalkers. You gotta get that prowl back. Get back your animal self.”

  “I got an animal self?” Winnie asked.

  “We all do,” he said.

  “Our inner animal.” Emmy almost grinned.

  “Yeah. Walkin’ right lets you see everything and learn how to move through it without disturbing any of it. Most people walk hard. Out here ya learn to walk soft. Like animals do. Now, what I want you to do is to look out like you done but without raising your arms and fingers.”

  Emmy raised her head and stared out across the sweep of land.

  “See it,” he said. “All of it. When you feel like you know what’s there, start walking. Keep on walking with your head up, bein’ as quiet as possible. Don’t worry about speed or pace. Focus on the walkin’. Walk until you can see what’s going on out there. Then come back and tell me what that is.”

  “But what if a bear comes along?”

  “If you’re walking right you’ll see it before you walk into trouble.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m not the one who has to be.”

  * * *

  —

  She was alone. He had taken Winnie and vanished silently behind her and she could feel their absence. The feeling of the land was like being pinned to it, suspended against it like a found specimen, its space, its place, its function unknown, the panorama jarring in its complexity. She forced herself to breathe and focused on that until she felt her indrawn breaths deepe
n and lengthen and a sense of calm settle into her belly and the field of her vision became wide and filled with detail. She practised picking out an image from her periphery without turning her head or peering sideways. She did the same with her vision of the ground at her feet and the canopy of the trees above her, with the pocked flank of ridge and scarp and mountain behind them. Her periphery became up, down, left, right, and forward. She’d never seen in this way before. She stood there until she felt certain she had seen the space in its entirety, would recognize this small territory if she saw it again, could paint it perhaps without leaving anything out. Then she began to walk.

  Most people walk hard. That’s what he’d said. She focused on not disrupting anything. Each plant of her foot was deliberate and she allowed herself to breathe, to relax, to sink into the process of walking and seeing and listening. The view shifted. There were new things at her feet and breaks in the pattern ahead of her and she had to wrestle with the desire to sweep her head around to look at everything. She stopped. She gathered herself. When she calmed she moved forward again and the bush began to open deeper ahead of her and she lowered her stance and crept forward with a stealth that surprised her. Then her foot caught on a root. She rattled small pebbles loose. Branches whispered through the air when she brushed by them and she wanted to curse, to mutter, grouse about her lack of finesse and furtiveness. But she held her silence like a weapon and moved forward. She’d only thought she’d seen what the panorama had presented. Here was a rotted log camouflaged in knee-high grass. There, a rock clumped with moss. An anthill alive with scurry. A raccoon dozing midway up a ponderosa pine. Trees, more than she’d seen initially, lined up one behind the other like troops until she’d moved far enough to see the jigsaw puzzle pattern of their scatter again. Moving forward became a dizzying array of detail in her increased periphery, the vertigo almost overwhelming, and she stopped and sat and breathed and willed herself to calm. When the feeling passed she stood up again and reclaimed the view and began to move. Time ceased its hold. Distance became irrelevant. Speed was an ignored process. She walked. She saw. She recognized. She became a creature again.