by Patrick Lane
She stood a moment, then turned toward him.
“What is this place?” Joel asked.
“This is a learning place,” Isabel said. “Soon enough you’ll find your own elder tree and you’ll begin to know. I come here to worry away the world when it starts aching me. I was taught by my grandmother when I was a young girl to leave a stone at the foot of an elder. This tree is two hundred years old. It knows more of this world than we ever will of storms and floods, of fury and travail. Leaving a stone is a sign of willingness and respect that was taught me by my grandmother who learned it from her grandmother and the mothers before her. I taught this to Myrna when my own mother died in her time. Myrna has an elder of her own. Here’s where my joys and troubles get taken. Here’s where I lay my burdens down.”
“Why’ve you brought me here?”
“It’s not a question you need to ask. You think you know why, but you don’t.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Listening is the hardest thing to learn, Joel.”
She quieted for what seemed hours and was only minutes. She said, “This world doesn’t change even though you might wish it would. You think things changed when Myrna got with child, but everything’s the way it’s supposed to be. You look in a pool of water and there you are. Swirl that water up and when it calms there you are again. Things happen as they must. I was walking this morning in the high pasture when this pebble spoke to me from a dust devil the wind blew up by the fence where you and Myrna always meet. A few feet past is where the trail goes up the mountain to the spring where sometimes you sit and worry your days.”
How does she know that? he wondered.
“The pebble had a red in it I never saw before in these mountains. The green band around was shining bright like it’d been licked by a snake. I’ve walked by that spot a hundred, hundred times and I swear that pebble was never there before. Who knows where it might’ve come from. It spoke and that’s when I knew what had to be done. I tucked it in my pocket here to keep it warm,” and she patted the side of her dress. “I knew right then I’d be coming here to talk to the elder tree. The other thing I knew is that I’d be coming here with you.”
“How’d you know I’d be here?”
Isabel went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Joel, there’s a spirit in everything around us just as there’s a spirit in this pebble. I know the name of what I hold. My grandmother would have called this stone Chalsey Doney. I love the name of it. It sounds like a horse dancing. That was its name far back where my people come from.”
“Where was that?” asked Joel.
“An old, old country. My grandmother carried such a pebble all her life. When she died I placed it under her tongue so she’d be safe on the other side. She told me a Chalsey Doney drives away the dark and protects the one who holds it.”
She held out her hand, the green band brilliant in her palm. It held the sun alive inside it, the green surround like a cloud in a forest swirling. “This’s for you,” she said, “but only for a little while. When you’re done with it bring it to this place and give it to this here elder. You’re borrowing it is all. You’ll find your own stone soon enough.”
He took it from her, the stone still warm from her touch. “What do I do with it?”
“It’s not a matter of doing. It’s knowing. Now it’s time for you to go back to the village and do whatever it is you have to do.”
“But I thought we were going to talk about things?”
“And what might they be?”
“You know, Myrna and all. The baby.”
“Oh, we did that,” Isabel said. “Weren’t you listening?”
ART WALKED SLOWLY down the road from the dump, dusty weeds sprawled along the ditches, fir cones lying among scattered stones like ornaments the trees had lost. As he walked he told himself again he’d stay away from the pipe and the bottle. He spoke out loud, angry, saying, “That’s it. You’re cutting back. You have to.” But even as he spoke he knew he wouldn’t. He had made those promises before.
He pressed his hand against the roll of cotton resting against his chest. “I will,” he said. “I will.”
When he came to Jaswant’s shack he stopped and stared at Gerda Dunkle sitting on Raaka’s porch. She was holding the baby, the familiar bundle cradled against her breast, the baby breathing or not, healing or not, still loved. It tore Art to see her. Gerda gave him a small, tentative wave when she saw him. It was not an invitation and not a dismissal. All she is trying to tell me is that she’s here with her baby waiting for Beate to live or to die, he said to himself. He wanted to say something to her, but he didn’t know how. All Art knew was that the little hope she had was for her baby, for Beate. There was little to nothing left over for her to share.
He tried to smile, but his lips didn’t work right, so he waved with his free hand and moved on, the road descending the mountain in tight curves and switchbacks. He crossed the high road and walked down the hill to the village. At the cemetery he turned instead of going on and stepped over the fallen palings of what had once been the churchyard fence. He wasn’t ready yet to go into the village or go to the mill. He held his hand inside his jacket touching the dress as he made his way among the wooden crosses, the few that were standing. Most of them had fallen over or were propped up by rocks, the old names carved or painted, most of them unintelligible, worn away by the sun, the rains, the winter storms. Seeing one turned white by the years, it took him back to the graveyards in France, his work there after the war, the narrow building where the crosses were made, quiet men putting them together, others painting them white, and then the names, the insignia, and too, the crosses without names, the unknown soldiers they buried, small bags in wooden boxes, bones in canvas sacks.
He stopped at the back of the church and pressed his face against the wall, his hand gripping the dress. He stood there for a long time with his body leaning into the weathered wood.
The sun was moving past noon as he passed out of the church’s shadow, runnels of tears in the dust on his cheeks. He wiped at his face as he stepped through the unhinged gap where the gate stood propped against a crooked post and started to walk down to the road again. He could see the women carrying things into the Hall in preparation for the dance. It made him almost feel safe to know the rest of the world was going on without him and he wondered if there would ever be a time when he could be like that. He was going to turn at the corner and go to the mill to see Claude, show him the dress, and ask him to do something about McAllister, but Art wasn’t ready to do that yet. He wasn’t ready to give up the dress. Claude would take the dress away from him and he didn’t want Claude to have it. Not yet. Instead he went on to the store.
In the arms of the women passing him were cardboard boxes full of decorations, coloured streamers left over from the last dance and the one before that, the paper bedraggled and torn from being taken up and pulled down too many times. Seeing the women brought him back from his confusions. “I’m going to be all right,” he said, his voice sounding normal to him as he took his hand from inside his jacket. He thought of the Christmas lights that Joseph would always try to make work at the Hall dances. Some of the bulbs were always burned out and Joseph would try to solve the mystery of finding out which bulb was dead so the string of lights would work. Art smiled as he thought of Joseph laughing and then accepting that the lights would never work no matter them being brought to the dance yet again. In boxes and baskets some of the women were carrying there would be plates and cups and glasses, forks and spoons, hard-boiled eggs, shaved moose and deer cold cuts, sausages, Jell-O and bean salads and cabbage salads, platters for sandwiches, baloney and cheese slices, wilted lettuce, oddments of eatables, potato salads, cabbage rolls, all kinds of crockery people could risk getting broken, stolen, or lost. Tables would be set up at the back of the Hall and wooden chairs of all kinds and shapes lined up along the walls.
Art knew Wally Yaztremski would have his speakers hanging from spikes on the wall with his record playe
r on a table in the corner where it was least likely to get bumped by some dancer thinking a woman was meant to be thrown around in imitation of some foxtrot, waltz, or jive he’d watched being done somewhere else. Back of the Hall in the field a few trucks and cars were parked. Most of the drinking would be done out there. Liquor wasn’t allowed in the Hall, but it got in disguised in paper cups of pop and lemonade and tea, beer in coffee mugs. In the shanty leaning from the side of the Hall was where coats, hats, boots, shoes, and children were left, the parents picking up clothes and kids sometime after midnight, most of the children asleep, the rest weeping, fighting, or simply playing in the beds they’d made for themselves there, the little ones burrowed under the coats for safety or just to find a little quiet, muffled as they were in wool or cotton or fur, empty pop bottles and candy wrappers scattered about, the music loud, their parents talking, laughing, or fighting in the Hall, among the trucks, or in the bush, depending on the hour, the wrong partner, the right one, no partner, too many partners, the wrong tune or corner, brush or back seat, the girls who were supposed to be babysitting the little ones long ago having deserted their posts in the shanty in favour of taking off into the shadows with some boy they knew come down from the hills or better some boy arrived from Blue River or Clearwater, a stranger, exotic and wild, the touching, the being touched.
It was all so ordinary, so perfect. None of them knew that he was carrying the blotched dress of a woman who was probably dead. He was almost at the store when he remembered he had to find Molly. That was what he was supposed to do. Still he wasn’t ready yet to give the dress to Claude. He didn’t want to think of Claude holding it in his beefy hands, what he would say, what he would do with it. No, he’d find Molly and tell her about the baby and then after that he might go down to the cabin and have a drink. Just a small one, just enough to put an end to the clutch in his belly, the sweat under his arms, between his legs. But no more opium. He’d had enough of that. Opium made him lose his mind and he needed his mind now. He touched the bottle in his pocket, but knew if he drank what was left there’d be nothing more until he could get to the cabin and he couldn’t go there yet. He wiped at his forehead and his hand came away wet.
Molly.
She had to be somewhere close by now that the women were decorating the Hall. He’d go and see Claude after he talked to her, after he went to the cabin. If he went to the cabin. He looked around but none of the women filing in and out with their boxes was Molly Samuels.
Parked angle-wise to the side of the store was Eddy Gibson’s green pickup truck, his wife, Ethel, taking a carton from the back.
“You seen Molly?” he called across the road.
Ethel smiled. Art had helped her son the year before, talking him out of running away. The boy was at school in Kamloops now. “I saw her a few minutes ago,” she called back. “Hey,” she said, “you’re looking a little the worse for wear.”
“I’m okay,” he said as he tried to smile. “A bad night is all. I haven’t been sleeping.”
She tilted the carton against the truck fender and leaned against it to hold it up. “How come you’re looking for Molly?”
“No reason. Just need to talk.”
“Yuh,” she grunted as she took the weight of the box in her arms, settling her feet in the gravel.
“You need a hand with that, Ethel?”
“Nope,” she said. “I been carrying stuff like this for years. It wouldn’t do to break the pattern by having some man help out.”
“Yeah, well,” said Art, “there’s always a first time.”
“First time? Hell, that was back when the little toy dog was new,” she said, and laughed. “Keep looking,” she said. “Molly’s around here somewhere.”
He watched her carry the carton to the Hall, relieved he’d been able to talk to her as if it was just a regular day, as if he hadn’t just been at the dump dancing with a grizzly bear and getting a dress covered with blood.
The long porch in front of the store was shielded from the sun, dust floating in the air above the step planks. Ernie Reiner was sitting in the shade on a bench against the wall, a bottle of Orange Crush pop gripped in his hand. Beside him was a guy Art knew from the mill. The man had been brought in a few weeks ago to replace someone Claude had fired off the boxcar-loading crew. A cigarette was hanging from the corner of the guy’s lips, smoke running up the side of his face. Ernie said something to him that Art couldn’t quite hear and they both laughed.
The two of them were watching the women coming down the road from their cabins and shacks with boxes and bags, others parading back and forth from truck to Hall. And then Art remembered who the new man was. His name was Dave. Art stepped back off the road into the shadow at the side of the Hall. He wasn’t up to dealing with Reiner and his new friend.
Ernie sat there grinning. “I wouldn’t mind having a bit of that,” Reiner said as Natalka Danko’s daughter Kateryna came up the road with two huge pies balanced in her arms. “There’s nothing like getting them when they’re young.”
Reiner said it loud enough for the girl to hear, Kateryna lowering her head and crossing over to where the women were gathered in the shade of the big fir tree by the Hall.
“Betcha her pie’d be awful tasty,” the guy called Dave said and they laughed.
Joseph was sitting at the other end of the porch, putting a new string on his guitar. When he heard that last from Dave he got up off the porch and as he took a step toward them, Art called to him.
“Joseph,” Art said.
Joseph turned, hesitated a second, and swung his guitar behind his back, nodding as he jumped off the porch into the weeds. “Those two aren’t worth looking at,” Joseph said as he came alongside Art.
“Fuck you,” Reiner said, stretching his legs, his body lazy on the bench.
The screen door screeched open and slapped shut as Molly Samuels came out onto the porch, a canvas bag of groceries hanging from her hand. The wilted stems of carrots hung from the bag rim like tired flags. “What’s going on?” she asked. When no one answered her, she said to Ernie, “You don’t need to talk like that. There’s kids around here.”
Myrtle Gambier hurried over from the fir tree on the other side of the road and pointed at Ernie. “That man,” she said. “He was saying bad things to Natalka’s girl.”
“You,” Molly said. She switched the bag of groceries to her other hand.
“I didn’t do nothing,” Reiner said with half a grin.
“I know you, Ernie Reiner. That’s just a girl over there,” she said, pointing at Kateryna who was hiding behind the other women. “She’s just twelve.” Molly took a step toward him, the bag swinging from her hand. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I was just kidding around.”
“Men like you are why women leave men. You’re a sore on the face of the earth, you are.”
“C’mon, Ernie,” Dave said, grabbing Reiner’s arm. “Let’s go down to the cookhouse and see if we can get a cup of coffee.”
“Fuck her,” Reiner said, giving Art a sideways, nervous look as he saw the first-aid man crossing the road.
“You seen McAllister today?” Art called out.
“Who?”
“You heard me,” said Art as he came up to the porch.
“He’s locked up inside his trailer,” said Ernie, his voice nervous as he looked around. “That’s where he was this morning when I tried talking to him. It doesn’t matter anyway where he is,” he said. “I don’t want nothing to do with him anymore.” He started to walk down the porch but stopped when Art spoke.
“What happened, Ernie?”
“I don’t know,” said Ernie. He jumped down into the dry grass, turned and looked for Dave, but Dave had gone into the store.
“Last night,” said Art as he followed him. “When you were with Jim. You two drove up to the dump.”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing happened.”
Art stood there waiting.
“
I don’t know what you want,” said Ernie. “It was Jim. He wanted to get rid of a bunch of stuff.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“He came down and got me from the bunkhouse. He said it needed to be done right then so we did it. What’s the problem?”
“What stuff?”
“We cleaned out his joy-shack and he had other things too from inside the trailer, clothes and other stuff in boxes,” said Ernie.
“What about Irene, his wife?”
“What do you mean?” asked Ernie. “I never seen her. She was in the back room, Jim said. I never went down there.”
“And that was it?”
“What do you mean, Art? We took everything up there like what I said and then Jim started up the D4 and pushed it into the rest of the crap up there. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the dump for Christ’s sake. That’s what the Cat’s for. Besides, who’re you to be giving me a hard time about it. You wanna know what’s going on about that stuff, go ask Jim.”
Art stood there very still, waiting for what else Ernie had to say.
“Anyway, fuck it. I gotta go,” Ernie said as he went around the corner of the store.
“What was that all about?” Molly asked as she came down off the porch.
“Oh, Molly,” he said, as if he hadn’t known she was anywhere near. The bottle of whisky sitting on the table back at the cabin was what was in his head. He’d forgotten her.
“You wanted to talk to me?”
“Oh yeah, I remember. There’s someone who’s got troubles,” he said. “I think you can help her.”
“Is it Jim McAllister’s wife? Is she okay?” Molly asked.
“No,” he said, for a moment confused. “No, not her.”
