Medicine Walk

by Richard Wagamese

  The roll of her words rode on the flicker of the fire. Words in firelight taking him back. As the tale wound down to its ending, he didn’t know that he was crying until she stopped. He stood shakily and wiped at his face with his palm. They looked at him and Bunky stood and put a hand on his shoulder. Neither of them spoke. He was embarrassed now and he stepped back and scratched his head.

  “Told ya it was somethin’,” Bunky said.

  “Where do I sleep?” he asked.

  “There’s a bed in the loft of the barn,” Bunky said. “I could walk ya.”

  “I’ll find it.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  He turned to go. When he looked back over his shoulder she sat in the rocker with her hands on her thighs, gazing at him. She watched him without speaking and he stepped through the kitchen and out the door and across the yard toward the barn. He found his way to the loft and lay in the bed and pulled the blanket and comforter around him and stared at the beams and timbers. He thought of her eyes in the firelight. The sheen of them something he recognized. He sought a word for it but was asleep before he found it.

  The ground was unrelenting. He pushed himself hard. But the morning only earned him ten more post holes and he was worn and spent by the time she arrived with his lunch. He drank the soup and smoked before he could gather himself enough to eat the sandwiches. There was no flask. He appreciated that. They sat on the running board of the tractor while he ate. The sky was the blue of old denim. There was the smell of clover and muck from the recent rains and he chewed and took secretive glances at her. She had a way of brushing her hair back from her face with one hand, slowly, using the tips of her fingers, closing her eyes briefly, and he was entranced by that. The sheer pleasure she took in it.

  “My dad was a working man,” she said.

  “Kind?”

  “Everything. He always said he liked the feel of the earth on his hands. So he did outside work mostly.”

  “Sounds like a good man.”

  “He died when I was twelve. Heart attack. Pretty much worked himself to death.”

  “He was Cree?”

  “White. My mom was Cree.”

  “She’s gone too.”

  She looked at him. He could feel her searching for words. “She left me slowly. Almost like one little bit of her at a time. She kinda gave up when Dad died. I remember that. How she looked. How she slumped when she walked as though there was a weight on her back.

  “She had no skills and she had trouble finding work. Dad was the breadwinner. So it was hard for her. She drank and she’d find men and bring them home. I must have had a dozen stepdads. None of them lasted very long. They would always leave her. Just vanish. No words, nothing, and she’d be heartbroken.

  “I’d see her standing in the doorway with this look on her face that was all barren and cold like a field of snow. I could feel her struggling to find something to latch on to. It would just end up being another man and another heartbreak. When I was sixteen she just quit. I found her curled up with her arms around a pillow the day after the latest one of them checked out. She just left. Alone and sad.”

  There was a hawk hovering in the wash of a thermal draft and they watched it. He wanted to offer something and he wrestled with words. It made his gut churn. He found nothing that seemed to fit. “Rough,” was all he said in the end.

  “I swore I’d never do that,” she said. “Never rely totally on a man. So I went to work. I cooked good so I went to camps and crew sites everywhere. Word got out that I ran a good kitchen and I was never out of a job.”

  “They hassle ya?” he asked. “The guys?”

  “They always want something, men. They’ll always try to snag a girl. Like it’s their right or their duty or something. That’s just the way men are. I partied with them but I never let myself get involved with the crew.”

  “Ever?”

  “There were men, yeah. I mean, I’m a woman. But never anyone from the work. When you work around men all the time you find things out.”

  He looked over at her.

  “Like they want to own you until something jars them, something you do that’s less than their idea of perfect or that shines less of a light on them. Then it’s like you can watch them remove themselves like a wave going back out. Just kinda gone. It’s what always happened with my mom. Washed away.”

  “And Bunky?”

  She smiled. “Bunky’s a hero, you know? He’s soft and gentle but he’s got sand and grit in him too. You saw.”

  “Yeah.”

  She fished out her smokes and held out the pack to him and he took one. They sat and smoked quietly. “What about you?” she asked. “Family? Women? Anything.”

  He smoked until the butt was down to his fingers and then he ground it out on the running board. He leaned forward on his knees and folded his hands between them and kicked at a clod and ground it with the toe of his boot. “Nothin’ much to say,” he said.

  He turned to her and she watched him closely. “You draw circles in the sand with a stick,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “You know. Like a kid. Watching you, you’re like a kid with a stick making circles in the sand because you don’t know how to shape words yet.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It means I get it.”

  “Good, because I don’t.”

  “I get that some stories are hard to tell. Like when you heard my story, it took you back to something. To someone, maybe. Back to a story you been carrying a long time.”

  “Some stories never need tellin’.”

  She put an arm around his shoulders and put her head against his. He could hear her breathing but all he could do was sit there like stone, his eyes on the ground. They sat like that for minutes and then finally she stretched her legs out in front of her and crossed her ankles. She tapped the sides of her boots together. When he looked at her she had her lips pursed and she looked at him, squinting. “You got it in you to be a hero too,” she said.

  “I ain’t cut from that cloth.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  She rose and brushed off the legs of her pants and when he stood too they were about a foot apart. She looked right into his eyes and he put his head down and shifted his feet in the grass. She raised his chin with one hand. “No one ever knows,” she said. “Life asks it all of a sudden when you’re not looking.”

  She stood up on her toes and kissed him. It was cool and damp. It was over in an instant and he stood there with his arms hanging at his sides. She stepped back, then bent to grab up the remainder of the lunch and turned and walked away. He stood watching her make her way across the field. At one point he raised a hand as if to wave then dropped it to his forehead, his mouth open in wonder.

  That night as he lay in the loft he could see the edge of the moon through the slats of the barn. It hung in indigo and cast a swath of bluish light across the bed. There was the smell of cattle. The rich, dry odour of oats, straw, and hay curing in the mow. The soft feet of mice in the corners. There was a sound at the ladder. He raised his head off the rough pillow and saw her climb to the top rung and step onto the loft. She wore a white nightdress. She walked silently toward him so that she appeared to hover and he caught his breath. She got to the edge of the cot and he closed his eyes. He could feel her watching him. He flicked his eyes open and she sat on the edge of the thin mattress and found his hand in the dark and held it between the two of hers. Neither of them spoke. She held his hand then opened hers and kept his in her one palm and stroked the back of it with her fingers. He couldn’t take a full breath and he felt heavy, unable to move. She took her free hand and put it to her lips then laid it against his cheek. He closed his eyes again and tried to pull the satin of it into him and he could feel her move. When he opened his eyes she was leaned close to him, the wisp of her breathing on his face. He reached a hand up toward her but she brushed it aside and held her position. Her
breath was dry: faint cinnamon lingering against a backdrop of wine. He lay with his arms held to his sides, staring straight into the shimmering orb of her eyes. They didn’t speak. Instead, she continued to hold a hand to his face. He put his hands to her hips and she let him. He searched for words but there were none in him. The tumble of her hair was like a curtain framing them. The womanly smell of her, all musk and soap and smoke. The sound of cattle rustling in their stalls and somewhere far off the yip of a solitary coyote chasing voles through the field grass. She stood slowly, his hands falling away from her body like a shedding skin, and she stood looking down at him and when he tried to speak she leaned over and put a finger to his lips and hushed him. He grabbed her wrist. They eyed each other and when he pulled her to him she didn’t resist, let her body settle against his, and he kissed her and she kissed back, his hands on her shoulders, hers at both sides of his waist. Neither of them moved. When she stood again his palms felt the emptiness of the space between them.

  “Don’t break the circle,” she whispered and walked to the ladder again and stepped down the rungs and left him hanging in the sky of her.

  20

  BUNKY FINISHED THE WOOD-CUTTING JOB and got busy with regular farm work. It meant he was around the place every day and it was the pair of them now that walked his lunch out to him. They sat in the grass and made small talk while he ate and he fought to keep from looking at her with more than a furtive glance. One day after he finished his lunch Bunky and he walked the new fence line and the older man seemed pleased.

  “I could lend a hand if ya needed it, Eldon,” he said.

  “I took it on, I’d kinda like to finish ’er,” he said. “A dozen more posts and then pull the wire. I figure she can’t best me now.”

  “Yer doin’ good. Yer a good hand.”

  “Desperation’ll make a man work his tail off, I suppose.”

  “Well, ya don’t look anywhere near so desperate now.”

  He could only stare at his shoes.

  He took to rising early and heading out on the tractor at first light and throwing himself into the digging before the sun came out and hit him with the full heat of the day. But it was more than that. Their kiss in the loft haunted him. He didn’t want to risk Bunky seeing it on his face. Guilt wasn’t a new thing to him. Dealing with it sober was. He felt as though every move he made in her company threatened to betray him. He was afraid to speak in case he blurted something that would draw attention to his discomfort and the reason for it. So he began to skip breakfast. One morning there was a sack on the seat with bannock, fruit, and a thermos of coffee. He grinned and ate it while he drove. Without drink felt as though he occupied his body for the first time in a long time and each day of work slaked the hard pinch of craving in his gut. He didn’t take wine with his supper. He didn’t take the beer Bunky offered on the porch when they sat out there late into the evenings. He could feel the older man studying him. He could sense questions in him but they went unspoken. Instead, they talked about the land and how it felt to them to be out on it with their back bent to some kind of labour.

  “It comes to fill a man,” Bunky said one night.

  “I ain’t much for poetry,” he said. “But I get what you’re sayin’.”

  “Poetry’s nothin’ but a man feelin’ what’s there anyhow.”

  “I guess. Never lent my head to it is all I meant.”

  “You should. Opens a fella up doin’ that.”

  “Ain’t exactly my strong suit.”

  Bunky puffed on his pipe and nodded solemnly. “That’s poetry right there. You sayin’ that.”

  “You’re startin’ to talk like her.”

  Bunky laughed and tapped the bowl of the pipe on the porch rail. “Funny how that’ll happen to a man. Never thought it’d happen to me. But I like it.”

  He took to watching her when Bunky wasn’t looking. He found himself pulling tiny details into him; the smallness of her wrist when she stirred a pot, the young girl look on her face when she studied a hand of cards, joy eking when she won a hand and how she could fall so easily into contemplation when something was said that struck her, the depths of her spinning away just beyond his vision like a swirling eddy pulling him to its depths. She caught him now and then. She’d tilt her head. She’d give a small smile and then turn back to whatever she was doing and his gaze would drape her like a cloak.

  He drank her stories in. He and Bunky would clomp in from the porch and they would gather in the living room and she would close her eyes and he’d watch her move into another place. She seemed to slip beyond time. When she opened her eyes again she was a totally different creature, and the words when they came were stunning in their flow. If he closed his own eyes he could see the details of the journeys she took him on and he was enthralled. He always felt lonely somehow when the stories ended, lessened abruptly, as if his sole contact with her had been severed, and he’d slump off to the loft in the barn, waiting for her to step out of the moonlight again and touch him. She never did. Instead, she’d look up and watch him leave, the feel of her eyes on him what he carried away.

  The work took him sixteen days. He was pulling the last strand of wire when she appeared in mid-morning. Bunky had said he had errands in town. There was a breeze from the south and the sun was hot on his back and he’d taken the shirt off and flung it over the last post as a marker. His muscles were taut and hard from the work and he’d lost some of the drunk fat. He felt lean and strong. When she called to him he turned and watched her walk toward him and he wiped the sweat from his brow with a forearm and stepped away from the bundle of wire at his feet. He didn’t reach for the shirt. Instead, he stood and tilted the water jug back to drink and then splashed his hair with it and let the water flow over him.

  “That’s the best part of watching men work,” she said. “The pleasure they take in it.”

  “Yer gonna have to spell that out for me.”

  She laughed. “Like when you see them half smile when something’s hard. When they have to strain with it. Or the look when something’s done and it’s plumb and square and right and they nod like kids getting coached at a game. Or like now, the splash of water. It’s fun to see.”

  “It’s sweat.”

  “It’s manly. I like that.”

  “That why you chose to work in the camps? So you could be reminded of your father?”

  She stared at him. Then she sat down in the grass and folded the flare of her dress close in around her. She traced a finger along the tops of the grass. Then she looked back up at him again. “I told you there was more to you,” she said.

  “Sorry. Just thinkin’ out loud is all.”

  “Don’t be sorry. You saw through something. You spoke it. There’s no wrong in that.”

  “Don’t know if it’s right.”

  “It doesn’t have to be right. It just needs to be said. People can sort out the right from the wrong together.”

  “Ain’t had much call for that sorta talk.”

  “Yet,” she said.

  He sat down on the grass beside her. He crossed his legs and plucked a spear of grass and stuck it between his teeth and gazed up at the sky. “Mosta the big talk in my life got left unsaid. Ya get used to that. Makes it tough to say anything real or hard. After a time you come to prefer it.”

  “Man talk,” she said. “Men think getting to the roots of things is trench digging. It’s not. It’s plain talk. Like a story.”

  “I never told no stories.”

  “You should. When you share stories you change things.”

  “Says you,” he said.

  “If you told me one of your stories, you’d get lighter.”

  “Don’t know as I have any worth the tellin’.”

  She smiled at him and touched his leg. “You could let go of something maybe you carried for a long time. I could know more of you. Get bigger with the knowing of you.”

  “You’re sayin’ you want to know me.”

  “Yes.”r />
  “I can’t see why ya would.”

  She took his hand, held it to her face. He watched her breathlessly as she kissed the palm of it. “I don’t know why,” she said. “I just do.”

  He reached out and pulled her to him and cradled her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. There was surprise there, wonder. When he bent his face to kiss her she closed her eyes and opened her mouth. She laid a hand on his chest as he eased onto his back in the grass. He rolled over and she lay on the grass with her hair fanned out around her head and he was on his knees looking down at her. She smiled and trailed a finger down his chest. He kissed her again and she wrapped her legs around him and pulled his head to her shoulder and he lay clutched by her with the smell of grass and dirt and stones at his face and knew he would never see the land the same again. When they made love it was gentle and sweet and brought them both to tears. He held her after. He had the scent of their loving in his nose and it mixed with clover and wild raspberries and the breeze. When she rose and arranged herself he could only lie there looking up at her.

  “I need to go.”

  “Bunky,” he said, climbing to his feet. “What’ll we do there now?”