by Don Gillmor
Stanford’s face was bloody and focused and he grabbed Michael by the arm and they spun through the open door of the butcher shop which Stanford slammed closed before driving the deadbolt across it. They ran past trays of short ribs and thick steaks, past a hog hanging above a pan filled with dark blood, and ricocheted down a narrow hallway, slamming through a wooden door and coming out into the alley. Then they ran west, stopping in front of a shed with windows darkened by smoke.
Stanford bent down and cupped his hands and Michael stepped into them and was hoisted up to the roof, scrambling to get hold of something at the edge. He rolled up and then offered his hand to his brother. They rolled to the middle of the flat roof and lay on their backs and listened. Michael counted seven seconds before he heard the sprinting anger of the mob, hard-soled shoes scraping on the scree of the dirt alley. Voices overlapped, interrogative and outraged, trying to make collective sense: the boys didn’t come out the west end; we’ve got men at the east; they couldn’t be that fast. Did the Great Goddamn Spirit come and take them? Well fuck a buffalo, boys.
The brothers lay still, staring up, concentrating on each breath. It was after ten and the sky still held a trace of light. Michael identified the faint twinkle of Cassiopeia, Auriga, Hydra, Gemini. Blood pounded through him. He looked at his brother’s face, one eye completely closed, a gash on his cheek, blood hardening on his shirt. Michael guessed there were ten or so men who came into the alley. He listened to the menace in their threats, what they’d carve out of him and Stanford if they caught them. Had they all gone? Maybe they left two men, waiting for the boys to show themselves. Michael felt the back of his own head, which was throbbing and had a patch of sticky blood.
After ten minutes they heard the striking of a match and smelled cigar smoke. They’d left one man at least. Their story was being told right now breathlessly in the saloon around the corner. Boys, the injun come up with a knife, fuck he got it from, looking to take some scalps. It was cooling off, and the man finally moved down the alley.
After two minutes, Michael whispered, “You think they’re gone?”
“I expect so. But we can’t go out that alley. They’ll have someone watching.” Some kid they gave four bits to to stand there and watch while they drank their whisky. And they were still scouring the neighbourhood, checking the yards and streets, checking under porches and shaking the bushes.
“What do you think made them so mad?” Michael asked.
“Anger just sits in some men looking for a way out.”
“Does it sit in you, Stanford?”
“It’s in everyone, you scratch deep enough.”
Michael stared at his brother. “Are you going to lose that eye?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t look good.”
“Then stop looking at it. Where you hurt?”
“I’m all right. My head’s sore.”
“Let me see.” Stanford examined his brother’s head, looking at the blood that was drying on his hair.
“Have you ever drank whisky before?”
“It ain’t the be-all.”
“Why’d you cut off his ear?”
Stanford was staring up. He hesitated. “I can’t say myself.”
“He’ll come looking for us. He’s never going to forget that.”
“I imagine he won’t.”
“You think the police will be looking for us?”
“I figure there’s going to be bigger criminals out there tonight. If there isn’t, this isn’t much of a city.”
“I don’t want to go to jail.”
“No one is going to jail.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“He ain’t dead.”
“Should we get rid of the knife, just in case?”
“We hang on to the knife.”
They waited another twenty minutes before standing up. From the shed roof they could climb higher and they clambered onto the next roof. From there Michael jumped soundlessly, but when Stanford landed, he let out a loud gasp and grabbed his ribs. They kept to the alleys all the way to the fairgrounds and got their horses out of the corral. They went west along the banks of the Elbow until they cleared town and then north through tall grass. From the hill they could see the lights of Calgary, spread out like something that had spilled.
They picked up the Bow and walked near its banks. The moon hung heavily to the west. The mountains were mutely luminous and looked like they were within walking distance, as if they had moved closer. Snow glowed dully on the peaks. Michael shivered in his wool shirt. Stanford was slumped in his saddle, and when Michael asked him if he was okay, he just grunted and kept moving. A mile later, Stanford leaned out of his saddle and vomited something dark onto the wolf willow.
It was almost four when they get off their horses and walked them through the gate to the barn. Stanford looked worse, his eye a ripe plum, his breathing rough. They tried to clean up with water from the well, but it didn’t have much effect. When they came in the door, their mother was standing on the stairs and Michael knew enough to not say anything.
She led Stanford into the kitchen and lit a lamp and held it up to his face. The warm yellow light scanned the new colours and lines of his face, the plummy eye, the long red gash, a welt that was darkening. She put a cool cloth on his eye and lifted his hand to hold it there.
“Will there be anyone at our door tomorrow?” she asked. She opened Stanford’s shirt and tested his rib cage and he let out a sharp gasp.
“No,” Stanford said softly.
She took a sheet from the hamper and examined it and then tore it into strips and began to bind Stanford’s ribs. “Just the same, you two stay out of sight until you heal.” She tightened the cloth and tied it and then put her ear to his chest, leaning in, her hand lightly on his back, surprised by his masculine bulk. “Breathe,” she instructed. “Deep breaths.” Stanford took a deep breath and coughed, then managed a few without coughing. Catherine couldn’t hear anything worrisome. If the ribs were broken they hadn’t pierced anything. Maybe they were just bruised.
She went to the pantry and took out a few jars of dried herbs and spooned some into the stone mortar. With a pestle she ground them to dust.
“Was it everything you hoped?” she asked, not looking up, twisting the pestle.
Stanford was beyond speech. Michael weighed the question.
“Did you do your race proud?” It was an accusation. Catherine’s voice was harsh, and when she looked up, her eyes were dark with anger. She looked at Michael’s handsome face that still carried traces of the boy.
“No one is dead?” Catherine asked, an afterthought. Stanford shook his head. She mixed the herbs with some water and made a paste and then took the wet cloth away from Stanford’s eye and patted the paste around it. She took Michael’s head in her hands and turned it matter-of-factly, as if it was a globe and she was searching for a specific country. She probed the damp spot on the back, making him wince. She washed it and applied a damp mixture of herbs and brought the lamp in close.
“Does your head ache?” she asked. “You feel like you’re going to be sick? Were you sick on the way home?”
“No,” Michael answered.
She looked at the two boys. There would be more to say, Michael knew that. She blew out the lamp. Outside, the eastern sky was lightening. “Go to bed,” she said. “It’s late.”
LOYALTIES
1914–1918
There was an inspector for the Indian agencies out here named Markle who didn’t want any Indians in the Stampede parade. Most of the churches jumped on board, saying we were being led back into barbarity by whites. So the Indian Act made it illegal for Indians to dress up as Indians and ride in parades. Another visionary piece of legislation. For Stanford and me it was more complicated given that our father was English. But Stanford made an instinctive decision to embrace his Indian past. I was leaning the other way, I suspect, but I followed Stanford. At the time Indians existed somewhere between
history and entertainment, and we were somewhere between Indians and whites. And then the war came along and solved all our problems.
Billy’s injury was immaculate; there was no visible wound, just his silence. Michael had known men who came back from the war like that; quiet and fragile, one wrong step enough to shatter them. They sat in the back rooms of houses or in hospitals staring out windows and smoking as their brains worked madly to erase their thoughts before they could articulate them. A few were still teenagers when they came back.
World War I was a watershed moment, the point when the country stopped being a colony. In war, a national character was created, or at least revealed (and certain fault lines were reinforced—French vs. English, that reliable standard). At any rate, the country came out of the war changed.
In 1917, the law stated that idiots, madmen, criminals, judges, women, and Indians couldn’t vote. Three from that group were eligible to go to war, though. Stanford enlisted because it was the most logical thing for him. I went because Stanford went. Not everyone wanted to go. Patriots and the unemployed signed up first. But they disappeared into the mud in France. The Canadian general Arthur Currie didn’t want to send his troops into battle at Passchendaele. He said they’d lose sixteen thousand men and it would be a meaningless sacrifice. It turned out to be one of the few accurate predictions of the war: They lost 15,634 men and gained three miles of wasteland that the Germans won back six months later.
We had the Ross rifle, a temperamental weapon that jammed if it got a speck of dust in it. It was designed to shoot clay pigeons at a country fair on a cloudless day. But there were deals and kickbacks and we were stuck with these rifles, useless as tits on a bull.
We were running out of soldiers too, and we’d run out of patriots and the unemployed to replace them. Next came the middle-aged, the suspect, and the deficient, but they weren’t enough either. So we had to force people into the army. War gave us shape and tore us apart, a unique gift. It gave us a glimpse of the modern in all its destructive promise. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the Allies suffered more than fifty-seven thousand casualties. In the end there were more than a million casualties on both sides, and we gained eight miles of bog, the pins moving an inch on the map in London.
When my great-great-grandfather David Thompson walked through the West, most Europeans still saw it as a wasteland, what Voltaire called those “few acres of snow.” Thompson tried to give it a shape. In Europe the opposite was happening. It wasn’t just borders that were shifting. The landscape itself changed, bombarded into fields of toxic mud. It was the unmapping of Europe: towns erased, lines redrawn every week. And I wandered through the waste like an explorer, like Thompson, claiming it for the king.
1
COCHRANE, ALBERTA, 1914
Who was the Kaiser, so wonderfully caricatured every day in the newspapers? A fat boy in a spiky hat marching off the edge of a cliff or stuck in a sandbox, or the earth impaled on that spike and weighing him down. Men in town talked constantly about the Kaiser. When our boys get there the Germans will be taken out to the woodshed.
Stanford’s integumentary system was good. Nervous system, joint and osseous systems, special senses. Teeth, gums, tongue. Good good and good. The doctor handed him a sheet of paper with a series of checked boxes and shook his hand.
He enlisted with the 31st Alberta Battalion, and in the optimism of that first autumn they left Calgary on a train to Montreal. A thousand people were at the station, hanging on to one another in small, shifting dances. All those boys. Stanford had grown to his full height, his blue-black hair combed back, and wearing the uniform added five years and Michael stared at this transformation. Catherine held Stanford tight and kissed him on the lips and touched his hair. “I’ll be careful,” he said softly.
Michael shook hands with his brother and they embraced and Stanford said, “You take care of things.”
“I’ll be there in two years,” Michael said.
“It’ll be over in six months.”
Stanford got on the train, a crush of uniformed bodies, all waving and blowing kisses. The train pulled away slowly and half the crowd instinctively moved with it, sending their love.
Michael and his mother rode back to Cochrane with Dunstan O’Connell, who had said goodbye to his own son, Colin. Michael sat in the back. His mother was in the front seat, listening to O’Connell, whose wife had died five years earlier and who was now working his way toward Catherine’s heart as slowly as a winter cattle drive. A gentle rain began to fall. O’Connell’s big raw hands gripped the wheel like he was trying to kill it. After eight painful silent miles, he managed, “You’re a handsome woman, Catherine.” When she didn’t respond, he just kept his eyes on the road and gripped the wheel tighter. Michael stared out on the pastures, wishing lightning would strike the car.
Every day Michael rode to Cochrane and checked the news of the war, which was posted outside the newspaper offices. At night, he sometimes woke up to his mother’s fractured cries. One night he saw her in front of the house in her nightgown, staring at the stars, singing, and shifting rhythmically from one foot to the other. In his room, Michael plotted troop movements on a map of Europe that he had sketched onto four deer hides stitched together and stretched over a wooden frame. The map was drawn meticulously to scale from the Brown & Attlee Atlas his mother had given them; to the south, it ended with Spain, to the north, Russia. Who knew how much territory, how many countries would be involved? He wrote the names of the battalions in blue ink with red arrows and dates to show their progress. The symbol for Stanford was a delicately sketched red eagle feather, currently outside St. Eloi. In a notebook he listed the populations of Germany, Britain, Canada, and France, and the reported casualties from each. It was a race to see which country ran out of people first.
The months leading up to Michael’s eighteenth birthday went slowly and each week the unspoken issue of his enlistment became larger. He didn’t see that he had a choice. And he ached to be there, to find Stanford. Michael wrote him letters, telling him about O’Connell, who had come calling and who sat in their parlour for an hour looking like a heifer on the killing floor. Their mother told O’Connell that ranchers were like bulls in the bedroom, and that she had no interest in it, none. O’Connell looked even more doleful and ate another piece of cake. Michael thought that if he offered the man a pistol, he might happily shoot himself.
On Saturday morning, Michael rode out to Jumping Pound Creek and set up targets. The trees had begun to bud but the early-May air was still cool. He made crude wooden targets using cross-sections of fir picked up from the Ghost River sawmill. He drew detailed German faces on them, with black moustaches and helmets and menacing features and scars. These heads were nailed onto poplar limbs, fashioned into enemy soldiers that he placed on the flood plain. Closer in he had empty forty-ounce lard tins, and closer still were jars that had once held tomatoes and pickles, near enough that he could experience their comforting explosions. He had a rifle of his own, and a Colt pistol that was given to him by O’Connell that his mother didn’t know about. O’Connell also gave him three hundred rounds for the pistol, part of the war effort, he told Michael, a bribe that had yet to bear any fruit. After school on most days Michael rode over to O’Connell’s and worked the horses that he was raising for the cavalry. O’Connell had thick grey hair and sad brown eyes and every day he looked like he was mourning something. Michael could see that he expected help or guidance or at least complicity regarding his mother, and he was careful not to offer any. So O’Connell moped by the fence as Michael rode the horses, bringing them into line. Like Stanford, he had become expert at breaking horses, whispering and soothing and riding them until they were quiet.
Michael took a few long shots, lying still, the rifle propped against a piece of deadfall. Then he backed up and charged with his pistol, firing at the lard tins and jars, feeling the satisfaction of each hit. When the targets were all down, he walked over to the large ro
ck that slanted into Jumping Pound Creek and sat there to bait his line. Above him swallows weaved tight concentric circles around the nests built on the rock face. The sun was warm and he was comfortable in his wool shirt. After an hour, he had three good-sized trout, which he gutted and filleted with his bone-handled knife and then fried over a small fire.
He set up all the targets again, arranging the Germans in new poses, grouped tightly and advancing toward him. He tried angling their heads slightly, making a smaller target. Another hour went by in glorious battle.
