Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

Joel felt like she had punched him, his gut sucked in. He could hear the wheezing in his chest. He couldn’t almost breathe.

  “There isn’t even any proper glass in these windows mostly,” he stammered, gulping at the air. “That over there is oiled paper, not glass. And the door. Look at the door. You could slide a one-by-four under it without touching either the door or the sill. How are you figuring to keep critters out? Tell me that. Let alone the winter snow blowing in under there. No matter if you even had a stove that worked right, there’d be no difference what with the cold and all.”

  “The baby’s three months,” she said. “This here baby is three whole months alive.”

  “Hell,” said Joel, letting out a huge breath and falling back onto the mattress. “It isn’t alive until it’s born.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “How do you know that?” Joel said, starting to shake.

  “Why are you talking so crazy? It’s just a baby.”

  “How do you know it’s alive?”

  “I can feel it in there,” Myrna told him. “You just have to push down a little and you can feel it.” She held out her hand to him, pleading. “Joel, I sing songs to this baby.” She placed her head on his shoulder. “You want to hear one of the songs?”

  “No. I don’t want to hear you singing.”

  Bye, baby Bunting,

  Daddy’s gone a-hunting,

  Gone to get a rabbit skin,

  To wrap the baby Bunting in.

  He was afraid of the singing she always did, and there she went and sang anyway, even after he told her not to.

  “That’s a lullaby, my mother says. She says she sang it to me when I was inside her. We were all inside our mothers one time. Like this baby inside me. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  “Stop,” he said. “Just stop.”

  “Will you get this here baby a rabbit skin like the song says?”

  As she said it he looked to her eyes and there were tears there.

  Quieter, the strength going out of him, a different kind of strength pouring into him suddenly, feeling it like a muscle he didn’t know he had, he said: “You sing pretty. You do. So please, please, don’t start crying. You don’t need to cry what with the baby hearing it, I mean feeling it. But tell me, please, what are you going to say to them up at the farm? You think you can just move down here to this old church and they won’t notice you’re gone?”

  “Mother knows.”

  “Where you are?”

  “She knows.”

  Joel lifted himself all the way up off the mattress, pushed to his feet, and kicked at the quilt tangled in his feet. Myrna pulled it over, covering herself. He stood naked by the shelf where the preacher must’ve stood as he wondered what to say next. It was like whatever was outside in the world wasn’t there right then. He tried to think of what else he was.

  She said, “You’re so beautiful.”

  But he didn’t hear what she said. He was thinking about Missus Turfoot knowing Myrna was having a baby. That meant Mister Turfoot knew it too or was going to know it soon enough.

  And what then?

  He spoke as if to himself. “You mean you told her when you never told me?”

  Myrna said, “She knew it was a baby when I stopped bleeding.”

  “But you never said anything about that before. If it’s three months ago, then how come you never said anything to me about her knowing? How come you never said anything to me?”

  “ ’Cause Mother told me you can’t be sure the baby’s going to be okay in here,” she said, placing her hands on her belly again. “The baby’s got to take hold is what Mother said. It’s got to grab on and hold tight. It can’t let go. When you know that then it’s okay to tell, is what she says.”

  “And your father? What about him? What’ll he say?” He grabbed his pants and started pulling them on, but his foot got stuck sideways in the one pant leg and he stood there rocking on one foot trying to stay balanced. For a moment he thought of the round of cedar behind Alice’s shack at the back of the store. It was like he was standing on it looking down at her and then he almost fell over and started hopping around the room.

  “Stop,” Myrna said, giggling again. “Father knows too.”

  “He does?”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “And you’ll come back later and help with this house of ours.”

  Joel managed to get his one leg into his pants and was starting on the other leg. “What?” he said.

  “Here,” Myrna said. “You’ll come here.”

  CLIFF CAME IN THE BACK DOOR of the bunkhouse after taking one of the log-boom boats out. He had crossed over to the other side of the river just above the rapids and tied up where the trail started, the one that led to the old log cabin in the meadow hidden behind a stand of old fir trees. The cabin was mostly empty except for a rusted-out tin heater and what remained of a handmade pole bed with shreds of canvas hanging from it that must have once been a mattress stuffed with cedar-tip fronds. When he first discovered the cabin what kept him coming back was the old sewing machine sitting beside the window. It was a Singer and he had looked and found a date on the base. The numbers were 1885.

  When Cliff had told Art Kenning about it the first-aid man said that was only a few years after the Barkerville gold rush back in the 1860s. That’s an old-timer’s cabin, Art had said. Art went on to tell Cliff about the prospectors, old Sinjun and the others like him, how they trailed down into the Interior to look for colour when their luck ran out up in the Yukon. Art marvelled at a woman living up the river that far back in those days. He said a sewing machine had to have been packed in from Kamloops on a horse or carried on a miner’s back. Either way, he told Cliff, that cabin’s on the east side of the river. Rough country over there.

  Cliff had gone back to the cabin that morning and sat in the chair in front of the rusted old machine with its cracked foot treadle. It’s what he did every time he crossed over the river, only this day he had thought of an older Alice sitting there sewing something, a dress or maybe curtains for the window. He knew she was only fourteen now, but he imagined her there anyway, them living together in a cabin somewhere. She’d be a year or two older, of course, maybe sixteen. He thought of himself bringing fresh trout up from fishing in the river and Alice watching him from the window where she was sewing.

  He wondered what her real home had been like before the Sisters grabbed her from the back of the wagon at the stampede in Williams Lake. He knew she hadn’t been a lost or forgotten child. She hadn’t been deserted or left behind by anyone. Her mother and father might have left her alone for only an hour or two while they were talking to friends. They might not have been gone more than a few minutes. And they might have left someone else looking after her too, maybe an older sister or brother, and they’d gone off to see the bull-riding or the chuckwagon races. He could see kids wanting to do that, telling the little sister to stay on the wagon until they came back. He tried to think of what the parents must have felt when they found their daughter was gone. Stolen.

  He shut the bunkhouse door behind him and walked up the line of bunks. When he saw Joseph sitting by the card table where the men played cards, he stopped and stared at the brightness of the light shining through the front door into the shadows.

  “You okay?” Joseph asked.

  “I know what I gotta do,” Cliff said.

  “I think you do,” said Joseph. “You got the look of someone who knows something he didn’t know before.”

  “What I got to do right now is figure out exactly how to do it.”

  “What I’ll do is play you a song while you’re figuring it,” Joseph said.

  Cliff nodded and went out onto the porch and sat on a chair in the shade.

  Alice, he thought.

  The first time he saw her he was coming out of the Rotmensens’ store. They were walking up from the train and taking her into the lean-to. She’d come from the residential school in Kamloops. Imma and Piet had bought her from t
he Brother there for fifty dollars. Art had told him that. Cliff remembered the wonder he felt when he realized you could buy a human girl for fifty dollars.

  Cliff leaned back against the wall in the rickety chair listening to Joseph’s music come through the open door. It was a tune he didn’t recognize. He asked what it was called and Joseph told him it was a country tune from a long time ago.

  “Has it got a name?”

  “It’s called the ‘Lonesome Road Blues,’ ” Joseph said, and he sang Cliff a line, lonesome road comfort me.

  Cliff leaned out, glancing back through the doorway and seeing Joseph smile that quiet smile he sometimes had when he was in what he called his Joseph place. Once, Cliff had asked him what that place was, but Joseph just said he only had that one name for it. “It just is,” he’d said, “and when I’m in it that’s where I’m at. This tune I’m playing gets close to where I am. Make sense?” he’d said as he put down his guitar. Cliff said he thought it did, but Joseph didn’t sing anymore that day and Cliff didn’t ask why.

  What Cliff wanted to do on this afternoon was sleep, the music from Joseph’s guitar lulling him. And he almost did sleep and in that half-dream place he saw Alice walking behind Imma Rotmensen along the gravel road from the train station. He couldn’t take his eyes off her and it wasn’t just because she was a pretty girl or that there were other men watching her pass by. No, whatever she was she caused in him a kind of sadness he didn’t know he had. It just happened to him, that was all. No matter she walked with her head down, her long black hair trailing down over her back, her poor clothes, and it wasn’t the cheap cardboard suitcase hanging from her hand either. It was the moment she looked sideways at him that made him feel so alone. Her look at him was there and then it wasn’t and why she chose him to see it he didn’t know, but whatever was in those eyes of hers burned right into him. That was the only way he could think to describe what he felt when she saw him, really saw him. She burned a look into him and bonded his heart. The moment she did his life was changed. He hadn’t known what his life had changed into or what was going to happen now it had, he only knew that day he wasn’t the guy he’d been before she went walking by on the heels of Imma Rotmensen.

  He couldn’t stop looking at her as she went on. He watched her walk up the road until she turned at the corner by the store. When she was gone was when he knew what the lean-to was for that Piet had built onto the back of the store. He knew the room with the high pig-wire window was where the Rotmensens were going to keep her locked up.

  It was a week after that first day when she arrived in the village that she began going down to the station with the wagon to pick things up for the store. Piet had made it clear that no one was to help her pull the wagon when it was loaded up. He said he didn’t want people bothering her. Cliff didn’t care what Piet said. He helped her twice before Claude pulled him aside in the mill and told him if he wanted to keep his job he’d better leave her alone. He told Cliff to keep his eyes and his hands off her. He called her that Indian girl. Claude told him she belonged to Piet and Imma until she was sixteen years old.

  “Crowchild.”

  That’s what he had said that first day when she passed from sight behind the store.

  It was a word he hadn’t said in five years. They had risen from deep inside him and because they had he said them again out loud.

  “Crowchild.”

  It wasn’t something new he’d been changed into that day. It was something old.

  Saying those words now stopped him remembering that first day he saw Alice. It wasn’t yesterday he needed to think about, it was what he did today that mattered. He got up from the chair and stepped back into the bunkhouse.

  “What was it you said just now?” Joseph asked.

  “Crowchild.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” said Cliff. “It’s just an old name I know.”

  “You okay?”

  “I think so,” Cliff said. “I think I am.”

  Joseph nodded as he turned to his guitar.

  Cliff only half listened to the chords as he walked down the line of bunks. When he got to his he sat on the edge of the mattress. He sat very still, the shadows on the floor changing as he stared at them, and then slowly, with what seemed great effort, he reached between his legs and pulled his duffle bag out from under the bunk. Taking it by the strap he stood and heaved it up onto the rumpled grey blanket where he’d been sitting. Before he opened the duffle he looked up and down the row in case someone had come in when he wasn’t looking, but there was only Joseph sitting by the summer stove playing his guitar, another tune he didn’t know the name of.

  There was no one around that might take an interest in what he was doing. He didn’t know where Reiner was, maybe out hunting along the river meadows. Cliff hadn’t seen him when he docked the boat, but that didn’t mean anything. Reiner could be anywhere. There were a few men at the next bunkhouse sitting out front on their porch next door, but they were mostly older guys waiting out the afternoon before going down to dinner at the cookhouse. Cards or checkers and they weren’t about to come into his bunkhouse anyway. Not without asking. And the kid, Joel, was gone too, probably up in the hills to the farm where he was playing around with the Turfoot girl.

  Piet and Imma had gone to Kamloops. They wouldn’t be back until late tomorrow afternoon. Alice would be at the store right now selling whatever people might be needing from the crap they had for sale there. The junk in the store didn’t mean anything to him, but Alice did. She mattered a lot.

  Claude would lock her up at six.

  Alice.

  He remembered how one morning when the store was quiet and no one was around he’d asked her if she knew where she came from before the Catholics stole her. She told him the only real memory she had was the residential school in Kamloops. All she knew of the time before that she’d heard from the Sisters talking when they thought Alice was too young to understand or remember.

  Cliff hadn’t forgotten what Alice told him that day.

  Sister Grace told the other nuns how Sister Mary saw Alice sitting under the back of a buckboard wagon at the stampede, no more than four years old. It was in Williams Lake back in 1950, the Sister said—that’s how Alice knew she was fourteen. It was Sister Mary who saved her, Sister Grace said.

  When Alice asked Brother Whelan about her mother he said her mother was dead. When she asked him about her father he told her she never had a real father like other children. Brother Whelan said her father was God.

  Alice said she cried when he told her that.

  She told Cliff she was little when the Brother told her God was her father. She said it scared her bad. She didn’t want her father to be God. She wanted her real father. The one she had before they took her away.

  What she said had stayed in Cliff’s mind like it was tattooed there, Alice saying she remembered her father holding her. What she said was she remembered his hands. And then Alice’s eyes got bright and she turned away.

  Her coming up the river to the village had changed everything for Cliff. Talking to her that afternoon had brought a lot of his own stuff back, stuff he’d worked hard to forget.

  And he was finished with Reiner and some of the others too. Sure, he’d gone drinking with the guys up in Blue River a few times, but he was done with them now. All the bragging and the bullshit in the bar added up to nothing but a wild ride down the canyon home and a hangover the next day.

  Those men didn’t know Alice like he did. They didn’t know anything about him either except what he’d told them and most of that wasn’t true. Being around Alice brought things back he’d hidden away inside. His own secrets, his own life.

  He dug down into his duffle and found the old work sock he’d hidden in the bottom. Undoing the knot he’d tied a long time ago, he shook the sock out over his bunk, the stuff he’d tucked away tumbling out. He didn’t remember the last time he’d looked at any of it. He pushed hi
s hand up into the sock’s toe and pulled out the papers stuck in there. The elastic band holding them in a roll had dry-rotted and it flaked off in his hands as he plucked at it, the papers unfolding. There were a few letters, some from his mother that she wrote after his father got killed in a fight in Cache Creek. She told him he’d been working on a paving crew there. Some kind of trouble anyway. There was always some kind of trouble. There were a couple of other letters, ones from his sister. She’d got married and had a kid. Lived down in Wenatchee in the States the last letter he’d got. When was that, three years ago, four?

  And there was his birth certificate.

  Cliff picked it up and unfolded it, the paper heavy and brittle.

  “August 23, 1936, Williams Lake, British Columbia, Canada. Cliff Crowchild Waters.”

  That’s who he was.

  That was his name.

  His mother had given him the Indian one. She told him when he was born a crow came to the Jack pine outside the window of the shack they lived in back then. It was the first thing she saw after he came out of her. She told him the bird’s spirit talked to her and so she gave him the name, Crowchild. The bird was a sign and she made his father put the name on the birth certificate when they registered him. Cliff’s mother had told him what the name was in their language, but the lady at the courthouse wouldn’t even try to write the Indian name down. She said she didn’t know how to even speak it let alone spell it. She said Crowchild wasn’t a real name either, but his father made her do it. Cliff couldn’t remember the old name now. All he had was the English.

  Cliff remembered when he was a boy they lived in Riske Creek before moving onto the Gang Ranch. His father worked there part-time as a cowboy and part-time at whatever they told him needed doing. He’d been thirteen when his father took them back to Williams Lake, a year younger than Alice was now. His old man had been drinking heavy again, and there were fights, yelling and screaming, his sister hiding, strangers drinking, the house parties, shame. There was little money and sometimes no food. They barely kept going. Things had been bad in that house they had. His father was white and his mother was Indian. She was one of the Toosey people. He didn’t know what his father was. English, he guessed. He missed his mother after he left home, but not enough to go back.