Luna

by Sharon Butala

  Blood surged suddenly through the tear in his pant leg. He pulled up the cloth so she could see the wound better. It spurted again, three feet it must have shot out, splattering against the washstand, this time brushing her own calf as it shot past. It started another surge, but Jasper clamped his hand over it, and the blood leaked around his fingers. The hired man pushed a chair behind Jasper and he dropped into it. He was growing paler. She straightened, frantically searching the room with her eyes. Do something—stop the blood! Outside, the cows in the corral were bellowing, searching for the calves that had been taken from them for branding and castrating. The noise was too loud, the blood too red, she couldn’t think. Then calm descended over her. Her eyes rested on the flour barrel, she strode toward it, bumping against the hired man, who stepped back out of the way. She wrenched the lid off the flour barrel, she could hear Jasper behind her taking short, quick breaths. She reached inside the barrel and scooped out a double handful of flour and carried it to him. He held his pant leg up, the wound clear, so small, a puncture he must have done with his castrating knife. She pressed the mass of flour against the wound, cupping her hands over it, pressing. Hold it, she told Jasper. He put his big hands where hers had been.

  She rushed to the bedroom, found an old sheet she had been meaning to make into dish towels, ripped off a rectangle and hurried back to the flour barrel with it. She folded the rectangle double, then scooped flour onto it, folded it again and then again, so that the flour was sealed inside. She took the flour filled cloth to where Jasper still sat, pressing the loose flour against the cut, pushed his hands aside, scraped away most of the blood-soaked flour, then quickly pressed the cloth against the wound. She pulled it tight. Hold it, she said again, and Jasper held it while she ran back to the bedroom and tore off another long strip with which to bind the cloth against the leg.

  The hired man went back outside. She began to clean the blood off the floor. Tea? she asked Jasper.

  The dream deteriorated into a shifting sequence of pictures, most of which made no sense. Then she was alone and it was night, coyotes moaning in the winter blackness beyond the windows. She was bleeding, the warm blood running down between her legs, her gut cramping, the pain growing, then releasing. No telephone in those days. Jasper away selling cattle. She would have to go out and hitch the team and drive the thirty miles to the nearest hospital if she wanted help. The baby asleep in its basket beside her.

  She folded a flannel sheet over and over again and wrapped it around herself, the heaviest thickness between her legs. She made herself a cup of tea and went back to bed.

  All night she had bled, bled and bled, and hurt, till finally it was over. One long, wrenching cramp that had forced, at last, a groan from her, and the baby she had not been sure she was carrying was gone. She had fallen asleep then, or lost consciousness, and when she woke again, the bleeding had dwindled to a manageable flow. She had heated water in the kitchen, filled a basin, taken some rags and scrubbed the inside of her legs. Then she had burned the sheet and the rags in the burning barrel in the yard, before Jasper returned.

  It seemed to her now, musing, in some realm between sleep and wakefulness, that a woman’s life was filled with blood. That its sticky texture, its odour, its blue-red colour filled her life, was always with her. Menstruation, miscarriages, births—I even bled when Jasper went into me that first time, on our wedding night. There was no woman without that intimate knowledge of blood. Trickling down your legs, smearing itself on all the things you own, your hands, reminding you of yourself, the self you don’t talk about. The self that seems most real to you, no matter how you try to pretend it isn’t.

  My bread. She opens her eyes. The light has grown yellower while she was resting. The day is waning. She rises and returns to the kitchen.

  The dough has mounded up above the pan. She washes her hands, butters them, punches the dough down, divides it into six equal sections and shapes each into a loaf. She butters six breadpans and sets the loaves into them. That done, she begins to carry in the wood she has chopped. It is time to start the fire in the stove.

  When she came around to the kitchen door again, her arms full of wood, Selena was standing there. Rhea was so startled she almost dropped the wood.

  “Well!” she said, and went inside. She set the wood down in the old woodbox Jasper had built years ago, which sat beside the cookstove. When she turned around, Selena was standing behind her. “Well!” she said again, and wiped her hands on her apron.

  “Oh, Auntie Rhea,” Selena said, her voice filled with dismay. “Why all this bread? You can’t possibly use it, and you don’t even have a deepfreeze.”

  “It’s for you, of course,” Rhea replied, “that family of yours.” She turned back to the stove, lifted the lid, and began to crumple paper, stuff it into the burning chamber and set kindling on top of it.

  “And in the cookstove! In this heat!” Rhea turned away from the stove without replying and went back outside to get another load. As she stooped at the woodpile, she heard Selena coming after her. Selena stooped too, and began to gather an armload. She wanted to tell her to stop, she didn’t want another woman interfering in her breadmaking, but she refrained, remembering that she had after all taught Selena to make bread, that Selena was her acolyte. Acolyte, she repeated to herself, and said it out loud, “Acolyte,” wondering where such a satisfying word had come from.

  “What?” Selena asked.

  “Hmmph!” Rhea replied, embarrassed. They carried all the split wood into the house; it filled the woodbox and an armful sat on the floor beside it.

  “You split all this yourself?” Selena shook her head. “I’m fifty years younger than you, and don’t know if I could do it.”

  “Forty,” Rhea said. “Let’s have some tea.”

  She set the kettle on the electric stove, turned the burner on, got down the teapot and cups and then stood waiting for the kettle to boil. Selena pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table.

  “I see you picked yourself some wild sunflowers,” Selena remarked, looking through the doorway into the living room.

  “Pesky things,” Rhea replied, having forgotten about them.

  “Wherever did you find them? They sure don’t grow out there.” She nodded her head toward the bald prairie around the house, on the other side of Rhea’s garden. Rhea shrugged her shoulders.

  “There’s a place,” she said, tossing her head vaguely to the north. “You take them. I don’t want them.”

  “What’s that?” Selena asked, pointing to a bunched plant hanging upside down from a nail in the old wooden ceiling. The flowers were still yellow although they were fading.

  “Cinquefoil,” Rhea said.

  “Cinquefoil! Whatever for?”

  “Hah!” Rhea replied. She lifted the kettle and poured the boiling water over the teabags in the teapot. While the tea steeped she checked the fire in the cookstove, opened the oven door and put her arm in, elbow first. She straightened, then bent to the woodbox.

  “It’ll have to be a lot hotter than that,” she said, pushing more wood into the fire.

  “I have to admit, that stove does make better bread,” Selena said.

  Rhea sighed, pulled out a chair and sat down at the table across from Selena.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” she asked.

  “You mean, what do I want?” Selena grinned. “Nothing. I was lonesome, so I thought I’d drop over for tea.”

  “Lonesome!” Rhea said, astonished.

  “Well, I can’t go over to see Di anymore.”

  “You’re lonesome now,” Rhea said, “what will you do when winter comes?”

  “Oh, take a community college class, I guess.”

  “It used to take us two hours with a team to get to Mallard. And when you got there, you weren’t anywhere,” Rhea said.

  “We should get you to teach the young ones how to make bread.” Selena brightened at the thought. “That’d be a good class for
this winter.”

  “Somebody should teach them,” Rhea said. “Lord knows. Some of them had better be able to make bread the right way. It could be forgotten.”

  Rhea rose again and poked the fire. She put another stick in, tested the oven again, and then set three of the loaves inside. The oven would hold only three loaves at a time and she had to keep shifting them because it was hotter at the back than at the front, and the left side browned better than the right.

  Behind her Selena sighed.

  “Things aren’t going so well for our community college committee,” she said. “They make us have a minimum enrollment before we can offer a class, and most of the women are only interested in crafts and things like that. If you offer something like history, you can’t get enough people to come.” Rhea sat down again and sipped her tea.

  “I don’t know,” Selena said. “It seems like people out here are satisfied with their lives, and they don’t have much interest in the rest of the world.”

  “Satisfied,” Rhea said. She thought of all the men and women who had come and then gone—neighbours, friends, relations. It seemed to her that the countryside had once been full of people, where now it was empty. “Except for Diane.”

  “Except for Diane,” Selena said. “Now they’re taking away our post offices, our branch lines, killing off the few little stores we had left scattered around the country.”

  “Soon there’ll be nothing left out here but grasshoppers and gophers,” Rhea said. They both laughed wryly, and sobered, looking out the window to the slowly sloping field of grass that rolled out to meet the sky. How it must have been, when there was no one here but the Indians and the animals, Selena thought.

  “The bank took over Louise and Barclay’s place,” Selena said.

  “No!” Rhea said, although everybody knew it was coming, she must have, too.

  “Yeah, they had to move out. Helen says they’ve gone to Swift Current to live.”

  “Poor Louise,” Selena said. “I wonder if they have enough equity to come out at least not owing.”

  “Should,” Rhea said. “Barclay should have let Louise keep the cattle her dad gave her. They could fall back on cattle now. Everybody so anxious to modernize. Look where it gets them.”

  “He hates cattle,” Selena said, pouring more tea into her cup. “It isn’t fair!” she said, banging down the teapot. “She worked so hard, she worked far harder than he did. She looked after the house, raised the kids and drove a tractor, picked rocks, harvest time she hauled grain—Kent even says she has a better business head than Bare, but he won’t listen to her.” Rhea lifted her head and her teacup to look hard at Selena.

  “She isn’t the only one works harder than he does,” she said, mildly enough. “You never noticed that?” Selena thought a moment. Ruth did, everybody knew that, even Buck. And maybe Ella. Does she mean me? she suddenly wondered, glancing sharply at Rhea. No, not me. Kent’s one of the hardest workers around here, cattlemen all work harder than straight grain farmers any day of the week.

  She thought of Caroline, little Caroline, as brown as a native, hard as nails. Running her own ranch back in the hills. She could ride and rope better than lots of the men. Broke broncs, even castrated studs herself, the men said. A head shorter than I am, she thought, and made an amused sound. Seeing Rhea looking questioningly at her, she said, “I was thinking of Caroline.” Rhea nodded. “She carries it too far,” Selena said. “I mean, it’s okay to work hard, but she’s just like a man.” She shook her head. The men all stayed away from her, and when they talked about her, they laughed. Funny, she thought. “It seems like it’s okay to work hard, I mean, you have to work hard or people think you’re no good—look at all the things people say about Di, because she doesn’t help Tony farm—but if you work too hard …”

  “Men don’t like women to try to take their place,” Rhea said.

  “It doesn’t seem fair,” Selena said, thinking at the same time, who would want to live like a man, the way Caroline did. “Cutting horses, yuck,” she said.

  But in her mind’s eye she was trying to imagine herself clumping into her own kitchen like Kent did, asking, supper ready? After we eat I’m going to doctor that heifer—no, I think I’ll ride for an hour or two first. Move the cattle out of that north field into Jake’s.

  She laughed aloud. Rhea said, “That wind’s going to pick up. It’s going to rain.”

  Selena glanced up at Rhea, then looked past her out the screen door. The sun was just as bright as it had been, the little patch of sky just as blue.

  “Gosh, your snapdragons are pretty,” she said, deciding to ignore Rhea’s remark. “You’ve got such a green thumb.”

  “Green thumb!” Rhea said disparagingly. “You just have to pay a little attention.”

  “I do pay attention,” Selena said ruefully, “for all the good it does.”

  “Give it time,” Rhea said, a note of finality in her voice.

  The light was turning golden now. The wind was rising. They could hear it soughing through the grass far out across the prairie. It drew closer as they listened and before long it was whistling its way through Rhea’s garden, snapping the shrubs and rattling the corn. The snapdragons bumped their swollen heads against the door frame and a kingbird rose, chirping in protest, to swoop indignantly away.

  “I’d better get going,” Selena said, jumping up. “If it’s actually going to rain I don’t want to get caught in it.” She stepped outside, holding her hair off her face in the wind, starting down the path to the gate. “Will you come over and help me butcher my chickens on Friday?” Rhea nodded, holding the screen door against the wind. “See you,” Selena called over the whistle of the wind, her skirt pressed flat against her backside. Rhea turned inside.

  As she shut the door she heard a booming clap of thunder. No rain, she told herself automatically, just thunder and lightning to kill a few cattle and split a few fenceposts. For a moment she thought the door she had just closed might open and Jasper would come stomping in, shaking himself like a dog, then peer out the kitchen window with his hands in his pockets, while she put the tea kettle on.

  She went to the bedroom and looked out the window at the sky. Black thunderclouds were rising above the hills, rolling toward the house. As she watched, sheet lightning flooded the sky. Nothing but a windstorm, she muttered, a tinge of hope nonetheless colouring her prediction and she hurried around the small house closing windows.

  In the kitchen she removed the first three loaves of bread, dumped them out of their pans onto the table, and put the last three in. This change in the weather wasn’t good for the bread. The kitchen had grown even darker. A few splatters of rain hit the window, and she went to it to look out, leaning against the sink. The wind was rattling the old barn. One of these days, she said out loud, it’ll blow down, and that’ll be the end of that.

  Still, she liked storms. They thrilled her, brought her some kind of peculiar comfort, the evidence that life was not as simple and dull as it often seemed, that there were forces no one understood, sky gods maybe, and a power that could transform the prairie. A flash of lightning turned the prairie momentarily white and then black again.

  She watched for another moment, then went to the living room, took the bouquet of sunflowers from the sealer, opened the front door into the wind, and threw them as hard as she could. They arced through the bluish, heavy air, caught by the wind, so that they went sailing, end over end, to disappear out into the storm.

  It had begun to rain now. I hope Selena makes it home before it breaks, she thought. That road can get pretty tough pretty fast. She sat down again in her big chair in the living room. The thunder crashed now and then with a satisfactory boom and the room flashed with lightning. All these years, she thought, listening and watching, making supper, always busy, always doing.

  Women! she thought. We just wander on with our lives, going here, going there, wherever we’re pushed, willy nilly. Busy, busy, busy. One day you look up and it�
��s over, they’re gone—the husband, the children—and you’re left alone.

  With each year that’s passed, Rhea thought, I have grown more and more into myself. I am more solidly myself now than I’ve ever been. She was sinking back into that blackness again, but Selena and Diane hovered in her mind’s eye, would not yet release her. No, she said to them, there’s nothing I can do; you have to do it for yourself, and then she was plunging again through the layers of darkness into that place she went that held both the past and the future.

  NIGHT MUSIC

  Diane is already in bed, watching Tony as he takes off his clothes. She is sitting up, her pillows pushed behind her, her hands clasped on the blankets that cover her knees. She likes to watch Tony because he is so beautiful. Well, perhaps his face isn’t quite perfect, his nose a little too big, his chin not quite sculptured enough. But, no, the whole effect is pleasing, really pleasing.

  “Gee, you’re a good-looking man!” she says to him as he comes and sits on the bed beside her. He grins at her over his shoulder, half-embarrassed, half-discounting what she says.

  You’re not so bad yourself,” he says, and then they both laugh because they’ve both said these things before. He sighs, lifts the blankets and slides under them, pulling them up to his chest, as she lies down beside him.

  “Well, here we are,” he says, putting his arms comfortably under his head. Diane puts out the lamp that sits on the floor on her side of the bed. “In the big city at last. Babes in the woods.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Diane says smugly. “It feels like home to me.” In the light coming through the window they can see the suitcases still open on the floor by the bed and cardboard boxes stacked up and squeezed into the corner by the small closet. The mirror, which hasn’t been attached to the dresser yet, leans against the wall, reflecting the streetlight.