Summer of the Horse

by Donna Kane

  The Earth is a body too. A body that seems indifferent to mine. A branch whacks me in the face. I trip over a rock. The Earth doesn’t seem to care if I bruise or bleed. In the same way, my body seems indifferent to me; it bruises and bleeds no matter how much I complain.

  Sometimes I think I love the Earth’s body more than my own. Maybe it’s because it feels more all-knowing, more absolute. Perhaps its separateness serves as that threshold, that still point I crave, the thing that holds each change in my body together. Maybe what I think is that the Earth knows everything about me, and the universe beyond knows everything about the Earth. Like nesting dolls, echoes and reflections reverberating outward in every direction.

  Seven

  Summer of the Horse

  It has been over seven years since the day of the book fair where Wayne and I first met. I had imagined a far more leisurely life together, one in which we’d nurture each other’s creative pursuits, maybe spend a year at his cabin at Mayfield without ever coming out. But what we did was buy an old farmhouse requiring endless amounts of time and resources, then added two guest houses to accommodate Wayne’s clients who come and go, filling my world with so much day-to-day activity that the life I’ve made for myself bears little resemblance to my original vision.

  “Have you seen my notebook?” I say to Wayne. “I need to add pick up programs to my list.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Wayne says. He folds a dress shirt and lays it in his suitcase.

  I stand in the doorway of the bedroom and stare at him. Tomorrow is the start of the Sweetwater 905 Arts and Music Festival, an event that Emilie and I co-founded nearly twenty years ago. What began as a one-night event has now morphed into three days of music, poetry and visual art.

  “Timing’s not great,” I say.

  “Tell me about it.”

  He’s off to Vancouver, to a board meeting with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, a position he’s held as part of his advocacy work for the Muskwa–Kechika Management Area. He’ll attend the meeting tomorrow, fly home the next day, and three days after that he’ll head into the m–k on the first leg of the summer’s expeditions.

  “Rob should be here in a few hours,” Wayne says. “I’ve put the horses who still need to be shod in the pen. When Rob’s done, he’ll let them back out into the pasture.”

  Many will say that Rob is the best farrier in the country.

  “A hell of a shoer,” Wayne agrees, “if you can get him to come when you want.”

  I know Wayne needs to go to the meeting, but the fact that he’s leaving me with the worry of Rob and a host of other tasks related to his summer expedition right when the festival is taking place pisses me off, and I can’t stop making it clear. My theory is this: if I don’t make it clear, Wayne won’t recognize all the compromises I’ve made, and he’ll carry on oblivious. I know the theory is flawed because I think he does recognize the compromises I’ve made but carries on regardless, possessed of a fervent anti-existentialist way of thinking where nothing exists except the big picture. Give him a medal, is what most people say when they talk about his work to protect the Muskwa–Kechika, a chunk of wilderness the size of Ireland, and I said that too. I suppose I would still say that, given a chance, which is hardly ever because I’m all caught up in the details, cleaning coffee stains from the pine floor, picking up socks, doing laundry, packing groceries into boxes labelled for each leg of his summer expedition, figuring out what I’m going to cook for dinner. Some days I wonder if that’s really why Wayne fell for me, because he could see I was possessed of an attention to detail that would allow him to focus on the whole. Of course, if that were true, then he’d probably say that his theory is flawed too, given how cinchy I’ve become. Cinchy. Now there’s a word I would never have used before I met Wayne. It means overly sensitive. Touchy. It comes from the experience of tightening the cinch of a saddle so firmly that the horse starts feeling uncomfortable. I make a mental note to add the word to the list of equine phrases I’m collecting in my notebook, expressions like up on your high horse; don’t switch horses midstream; going to see a man about a horse.

  I look at my watch. “I have to go.” I give him a hug but it lacks sincerity and as soon as I’m in the car on my way to Emilie’s, a few miles west of our place in Rolla, twenty-five miles northeast of Dawson Creek, I feel guilty. Which means I get to add to my list of worries the possibility that Wayne will die in a car or plane crash or maybe get hit on a crosswalk on Robson Street, and I’ll never get to tell him again that I love him. And I do.

  At the end of it all, I have only myself to blame. I take on too much and then I gripe about it. I drive into Emilie’s yard and just the sight of her, sixty-five years old, wild hair and tight designer jeans, a T-shirt with sequins on it, calms me down. “Sexiest woman around the campfire,” is how one cowboy put it at last year’s cattle roundup.

  Emilie and I met in 1997, at a student art show, when I was living in Bessborough, a forty-minute drive east of Rolla. It was my second year of studies and the instructor had given me my own wall to display my drawings. Emilie attended the show. She was a local celebrity, an artist who took herself seriously. She’d built a studio in her yard, she’d had exhibits of her work and she’d even made a bit of a name for herself for incorporating cow placentas into her sculptures. She looked at my drawings and told me to keep at it, that she liked what I was doing. I couldn’t believe how great her comment made me feel. Shortly after, I bought one of her sculptures. It was more than I could afford, so I had to pay for it over time. Which meant that every few weeks I’d drive to her place in Rolla with a cheque, and she’d invite me into her studio, and we’d visit.

  One evening during that time, Emilie phoned and asked if I’d come pick her up at the Farmington Store, a gas station and liquor outlet along the Alaska Highway, a few miles east of Bessborough.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Larry and I had a spat.” On the drive back from the community pasture where Emilie and her husband, Larry, kept their cows over the summer, Larry had kicked Emilie out of the truck. I don’t think I ever heard what the argument was about.

  When I arrived at the Farmington Store, Emilie was sitting outside on the bank along the highway, the ditch lush with grass and wildflowers, her two collie dogs beside her. She was drinking a cider. She was nonchalant. There were nimbus clouds so black they were turning purple. Thunder and lightning. Emilie opened the back door of my Jeep and the dogs jumped in and she hopped into the front. As we drove along, she told me all the things she liked about me. She said she couldn’t understand my insecurities, my blindness to my potential, and the sun knifed through the clouds, an effervescent, apple-bright light. Emilie gave me confidence. She believed in my abilities as a visual artist. Although by then I’d decided I didn’t want to be a visual artist. I wanted to be a writer.

  “Poetry is what I really want to do,” I told Emilie. “I should never have given it up.” Which made it sound like it had been a bit of a career at one point, but that wasn’t true. I had written poetry, or, more accurately, drivel, when I was a kid. And then, after high school, I’d quit because I thought it was an adolescent pursuit.

  Today, when Emilie sees me in the driveway and walks over and we laugh and give each other a hug—a full-bodied embrace that says, thank god we have each other—I feel another twinge of guilt for rushing off without giving Wayne a proper goodbye. Emilie and I go through our checklist. We still have to pick up the programs from the printer and the alcohol for the beer garden, and then we need to get back to the farm to meet the artists who are hanging their work in the barn stalls. I have to get Emilie’s studio ready for the poetry readings—there are chairs to set out, a podium to haul from our place, bird shit to mop up from the budgies who fly at large throughout her workspace.

  Heady with the success of that first Sweetwater festival, my zeal for organizing had taken off. I began
a reading series; I initiated poetry retreats, a ­writer-in-residence program. In 2000, at a retreat at Moberly Lake, mentor Jan Zwicky gently cautioned me, “You can be an organizer, or you can be a poet. It will be hard for you to be both.” At the time, I didn’t believe her. I worked part-time at the college. My two children were nearly grown. The poems came easily. I published a book. Then, in 2006, I met Wayne.

  In that early flurry of emails he asked, “How would you like to organize an artist retreat in the wilderness?”

  The day before Wayne and I met to discuss the retreat, I’d gone for a walk with my family: my husband and two children, my parents, my sister and her family. We’d walked through an evergreen forest on my parents’ property. It was winter and there’d been a slight warming period that had drawn out the moisture in objects along the trail, moisture that had then frozen again, forming a skin of ice on dead poplar leaves, encasing a coyote’s tooth, moose droppings, objects exquisitely coated in a thin crystallized shell. I remember thinking that I probably wouldn’t have noticed these things had they not been transformed by the ice and frost, had they not undergone an elemental change. And how I might not have known that my marriage was over if I hadn’t met Wayne.

  Now, with every year that passes, I spend less and less time writing. I spend less time in the Muskwa–Kechika as well. As Wayne’s business grows, someone needs to be at home to look after the bookkeeping, the logistics of getting people and supplies in and out of the mountains. At this time of year, when Wayne’s expedition and the festival are at their peak, I am completely overwhelmed.

  Emilie’s yard is already a hive of activity. The sound technicians have arrived. People have started to pitch their tents and park their campers in the field behind the mainstage. There’s an issue with the merchandise table. We’ve set it up in the machine shed turned beer garden, underneath the shed’s loft. The loft will be used for the VIP lounge; it has a great view of the mainstage, but the locals are up there, Trevor and Wiley, drinking beer and smoking, their cigarette butts falling through the cracks of the plank floor and onto the CDs, T-shirts and the heads of the volunteers.

  “No smoking!” Emilie yells at them. “Read the signs! If Larry’s shed burns down, I’m done for.”

  Emilie and I double-check the alcohol order. We drive into town in Emilie’s pickup.

  “You sure the suspension can take the weight?” asks the woman at the liquor store as we load case after case into the back of Emilie’s truck. We pick up the programs and head back to the festival site. The artists have arrived and are hanging their paintings on the rough planks of the barn stalls that will be their gallery for the weekend. Finally, I drive to Fort St. John to get Jeanette Lynes, a poet arriving on a late flight from Saskatoon. It’s midnight before we get back home.

  Brian Jungen, an artist who has been spending his summer in Rolla, staying in our yard in his camper and helping out with the chores, has been in Grande Prairie all day. I see his vehicle when we pull into the driveway, but he’s not in the house, and the camper is dark. Asleep then.

  Jeanette and I have a glass of wine in the living room. How wonderful to finally have a few moments with an old friend to talk about writing—writing! Jeanette sits on the couch, and I sit facing her on an expansive leather chair that Wayne and I bought cheap because it was used and smelled like cigarette smoke. I sprawl across it, my feet dangling over the edge of its wide arm. I feel so goddamned happy. I gaze, satisfied, at the bookshelves along every wall, shelves that Wayne and I are in constant competition for, and which, over time, Wayne has taken over. My books, though they likely surpass Wayne’s in number, are thinner, most of them volumes of poetry. Over the years I have added bookshelves to my office to make more space for Wayne’s in the front room. It’s a terrible trait I have, one that says sure, go ahead, and then feels bitter about it. On some of the shelves are bones and fossils that Wayne has collected; there’s a narwhal tusk on the wall and a mammoth tusk in the corner of the living room and in a curio cabinet—fossils and petrified teeth. It takes a steady watch, I think, to keep this room from filling with bones. Jeanette is asking me about our farm. She wants to know what it will mean when Wayne goes away for the summer.

  “Farm to me means having to get up every morning to do chores,” she says.

  “Then this isn’t really a farm,” I assure her. “We rent the land, and this summer the horses who aren’t going on the trail are being pastured at the Hutterites’. This summer, besides yard work, I won’t have to do chores.”

  In fact, I have done everything I can to make this summer mine. The horses are pasturing elsewhere so I won’t have to pitch hay when the rain doesn’t come and the grass dries up; the guests who come and go will be encouraged to fend for themselves in the kitchen. I am a writer, I keep telling myself. I need to write. This summer will be my time to write.

  Over the past few days, our house has been filling up with guests. Some are going on Wayne’s expedition and some are performing at the festival. With Wayne gone to Vancouver, and people needing places to sleep, I’ve moved out to the garden shed. Which I’m pleased about because it gives me a place of my own. I’ve hauled out an air mattress and some bedding. The shed has electricity so there are lights and I can pick up the Wi-Fi to check my email in case there are any last-minute messages from the festival crew. I’ve brought a kettle of water and a French press so I can have coffee in the morning before having to talk to anyone. I’m jumpy as hell, but being in a place where I feel like no one is going to walk in, where no one is going to ask for something, works like a sedative. I fall asleep. But then, as though some internal hour chimes in me, I wake up at 3:00 a.m. Every night I do this. The dead hour, they say. I have to pee.

  I go outside. Solstice is only a few days away; it’s light out. Rain has fallen in the night, but it’s clear now, the willows and aspen trees glistening, and I can see the horse pasture, mist rising from the wet grass, the air rinsed and bright. Some of the horses are lying down. I stand as still as I can. I tell myself to stop, to soak in the quiet. Soon it will be morning, first day of the festival, and the chaos will begin.

  Sometimes, though I don’t believe in God, I behave as though I do, thinking I am being shown the error of my ways. Serves you right, this God-like thing whispers in my ear, you wanted too much, you wanted to be a writer, but that wasn’t good enough, you wanted to do all these things for other people so you could feel better about yourself, you wanted to leave your husband, you wanted another man, you wanted to go into the wilderness, you didn’t care how much pain you’d cause, and now I’ll show you, I’ll show you, you little floozie, what it’s like to never write again.

  I return to the garden shed and sleep. I wake to my alarm—7:00 a.m. I make coffee, check my email. There’s one from Wayne, asking how things are going, how the shoeing went—Can you check the horses? I leave the garden shed and go into the house. Jeanette is still asleep. I have to get ready to head to the airport to pick up John Barton, another poet performing at the festival. Brian’s up and sitting on the couch, checking his email. He says that Wayne has sent him a message too, and that he will check the horses.

  I go upstairs to get ready and Brian heads out to the corrals. He opens the gate and sees a pool of blood in the muck of rained-on gumbo. Then blood spattered on the planks of the corral. He thinks something has gotten into the pen and attacked the horses. Then he sees Comet, the big sorrel gelding with a straw-­coloured mane, bite marks on his back, hide ripped from the shoulder, the thick leather of it hanging, a drapery of blood and the horse shaking.

  I’m brushing my teeth when I hear Brian call my name from the porch.

  “Comet’s cut up,” Brian says when I go to the top of the stairs and look down.

  “How bad?”

  “Bad.”

  “Do I call the vet?”

  “Yes.”

  Rob hadn’t come. The horses had stayed in the
pen all night without food or water and in their restless state had picked on Comet, the lowest horse in their pecking order. Comet must have been pushed against the railing of the pen, because somewhere in the tussle a plank had broken off and a bolt had hooked into his hide and torn him open. Someone should have checked them. Someone should have checked with Rob. That someone was me. I feel nauseous. And it’s not because I forgot; it’s because, so caught up in the festival and in myself, I hadn’t even bothered to add that reminder to my list.

  I have to pick up John, leaving Brian to wait for the vet. I don’t see the stitching, the tetanus shot, the painkillers, I don’t see Brian bring Comet a five-gallon pail filled with water and see Comet drink it all. I don’t hear the vet say how lucky Comet is that the wound is where it is: had the injury been lower down on the leg, recovery might have been harder, but with the wound higher up, the horse will live. But not without a lot of care. Comet will need two hosings a day for twenty minutes each for at least two months; he will need ointments and antibiotics. It will take a long time for the wound to heal.

  Eight

  Something about a Horse

  One summer on the trail, as the pack string made its way over the alpine ridges from Trimble Lake to the Besa River, all it did was rain, the trail becoming more churned up and harder to navigate as the hours passed, the exposed roots of spruce trees slick as greased metal rods. Wayne could see my energy and the energy of our four guests start to flag. After making a descent into a narrow valley with just enough trees for shelter and just enough grass for the horses, he decided to stop early and set up camp. Cold and wet, our group sat scrunched in a strip of spruce and poplar along the steep bank of a creek around a fire that smoked more than it flamed. The horses grazed nearby. I couldn’t wait to be done with the dinner and the dishes and crawl into the dry tent. Once inside our sleeping bags, the warmth of Wayne’s body was a life raft I clung to as the rain pelted down.