by Donna Kane
“Sally likes you,” Emilie says, as she always does, but today she seems more adamant. All through the day she says, “I think you need to buy Sally.” And all through the day I consider her offer. I’ve been thinking that Comet could use a friend, a horse that’s not likely to push him around. Bailey is too spirited and Ronnie, another gelding, would stir Comet up. Back home on the deck, emboldened by the day’s ride and a glass of wine, we seal the deal. I write Emilie a cheque. Emilie takes it, and we clink our glasses. When Emilie drives out of the yard, Sally is left behind in a pen next to Comet.
I have bought myself a horse, something I would never have imagined myself doing, and not just in my old life, but also in my new. What have I done?
Wayne and I are on top of the world in the Southern Caribou Range.
Twenty-Four
Hooping the Badlands
Each year, when Wayne returns home from the summer’s expeditions, there is a resettling period that is as awkward as it is exciting. Sometimes we go away to disconnect from where we’ve each spent our summers. One year, we went on a short holiday to the central Alberta badlands. It was the year I’d taken up hula-hooping, something I’d done as a child, but had forgotten about until that summer, when a young woman at the Rolla Pub showed me a hula-hooping trick and I was so inspired I bought the thing from her—pvc tubing wrapped in black-and-red surveyor’s tape. I hooped afternoons in Emilie’s studio, narrowly missing her sculptures while she laughed and budgies flew in circles above our heads. I hooped after work, friends urging me on from the wooden deck—warm August nights on the lawn, northern lights huffing away; by the big weeping birch in the rain.
By September I could swing the hoop up past my chest, to my neck, a few lumbering loops around the throat before lifting it into the air, spinning it loose in my hand, then bringing it back down. On the eve of our road trip, I hooped toward the Oldsmobile and shoved it in.
We drove under a gentian blue sky, a blue that dissolved to a paleness at the horizon, the sky so broad and uninterrupted I swear its curvature showed, giving me a glimpse of more than a dome as it rounded the distant edges of the wheat fields now being swathed into blond, pillowy lines.
“I watched a YouTube,” I told Wayne, “where someone stuck a camera to a hula hoop so it faced inward, toward the person, and when you watched it, it was like the person was spinning but the hoop was still. It was amazing.”
“You were seeing it from the perspective of the hula hoop,” Wayne said, “which is not your usual point of view.” He looked pleased, as though he’d explained everything. Good point, I thought. Sometimes my point of view is that I stay in Rolla expediting guests in and out of the mountains, keeping the books and the yard together, going to work while Wayne travels up and down one mountain pass after another. My perspective is that it’s easier for Wayne. He’s having more fun. My perspective is that the experiences I’ve had pale in comparison to his. Although I imagine his own frame of reference would go something like this: this is how to raise awareness of the Muskwa–Kechika. He leaves our yard in June and returns in September. The trail is rigorous and the days are long.
A road sign told us we were getting close to the park. The late-day autumn light cut deep shadows into the earth, lifting the swaths of grain into relief, the combines’ chaff furring the air a sweet amber and every now and then a slough flashed by, the water sucking in the shadows, the ponds dark and gleaming, ducks glinting on top, and above us the moon had begun to show, a salt tablet gaining in brightness until it stung my eyes as we crossed a landscape that never stopped, then did, all at once.
We’d arrived at a mesa-like brink, its edge dropping five hundred feet into a broad valley. Miles of prairie slammed to a stop.
“Whoa!” I said. “I did not see that coming.” The scene stopped my breath. It was as if the past had been made transparent.
“It looks so puny,” I said, looking down at the Red Deer River. It’s hard to imagine that the river has cut down through the sediments, year after year, carrying the soil away, opening up this canyon, how the perpetual movement of wind and water has sculpted the earth, scoured through clay and sandstone to form hoodoos—pillars of sediment with a resistant rock on each top like an umbrella. The shape of the valley’s humps and hillocks, heavy with clay, looked organic—soil rising into muscled shoulders, elephantine legs. The clay, cracked from the dry microclimate of the valley, has the texture of leathery hide, the hills ribboned with layer upon layer of sediment, like rings around a bathtub.
“Each era,” I said softly, drawing in my breath, “sucked down the drain.”
The place seemed to have stopped, as though it were under a spell. I knew it wasn’t true. The forces of wind and water were still at work, I just couldn’t see it.
We drove down the steep and winding clay road to the river, the watercourse looking a little more substantial close up, and parked along its bank at the picnicking site. A sign told us the bentonite in the clay could become slippery and impassable when wet, and we could not stay the night. The only sound was the wind, slewing the aspen leaves that had fallen to the ground. I am a part of this, I thought. I am also apart.
Wayne opened the trunk of the car and took out his backpack. I saw my hula hoop.
“What the hell,” I said.
I hoisted the hoop over my shoulder and we struck off through scrub brush and grass meadow. The sun was at the horizon now, a waxen pool of red and orange, the heat of the day still cupped in the valley, the air pungent with dust and sage. A deer on the rise of a hill thrashed the brittle leaves of a willow with his antlers, antlers that had grown through the summer faster than snap beans. I’ve read that touching the branches of the willows with the tips of their tines, the palms of their racks, helps the animals rub off their velvet, but Wayne thinks it also helps them to know what they’ve become. The buck, tawny as the muted landscape, saw us too. He lifted his head, muscles tight, ears and tail flicking. He stared. We stared.
We reached the sand flats, and then scrambled up a clay bluff. I grabbed one of the rocks for balance and it was warm, the sun’s rays drawn in, now radiating out. We reached the top of the hill to another panorama of striated earth.
Wayne bent down and picked up a chalk-coloured rock with a pink glaze. He handed it to me. “A dinosaur bone,” he said. I touched my tongue to the object’s cool surface. The rock stuck, locking my tongue to its papery grip. A paleontologist had shown Wayne this diagnostic trick—and Wayne had shown it to me—but, so focused on finding bone, he hadn’t asked how it worked. I turned the fossil over in my hand.
“Probably a piece of hadrosaur rib,” Wayne said.
A duck-billed dinosaur, the hadrosaur was one of the most common dinosaurs in the badlands. “Cows of the Cretaceous,” Wayne likes to say. Like cows, hadrosaurs ate grass and moved in herds. Unlike cows, they laid eggs and were each roughly the size of an elephant. The dinosaur whose bone I’m holding lived sixty-seven million years ago. Who knows how it died, but a bone bed, like many found in the badlands, suggests a major event. Maybe mass starvation. Maybe a flood that swept the dinosaurs downstream as they tried to cross a swollen river, the swirling eddies and whirlpools sucking the animals to the bottom where the water’s current moved them around until silt covered them, preserved them. As their bodies decomposed, the minerals in the surrounding sediments would have replaced the dinosaur’s bones molecule by molecule, turning them from organic to mineral, sometimes with such fidelity that even the structure of the cells were retained.
“Maybe,” said Wayne, “the molecules of dinosaur bones have the same structure as Velcro. That’s why they stick to our tongue.”
Wayne headed toward another cliff, his agile body moving easily over sandstone and boulders.
I set the rib down. Dry Island Buffalo Jump is a provincial park and you can’t take fossils with you. And why would you want to? If I had taken the dinosaur b
one home, it would have sat on the sill of my window. And then what? A moment, this moment, can’t be kept. Standing there, the past pried open, made my life feel not just short, but petty. The time in which my worries would matter were clearly far less than the time in which they wouldn’t. I found this strangely comforting, and then astonishing, that I was standing here at all, knowing I was not yet a part of the past. And my capacity to apprehend my amazement struck me as something special, almost omnipotent. I felt a flush of excitement, as if I were on to something. And then it was gone.
I put the hoop around my waist, positioning it so it pressed into my back. I felt its shape and weight before giving it a spin. It circled my body like a moon’s orbit, the plastic tubing revolving so fast that static electricity raised the hairs on my arms; around me the hills, their bands of strata like tracings of the Earth’s rotation.
I spun the hoop and took the moment in: here were my bones and here were the bones of creatures who lived millions of years before me. Here were my feet planted on the same soil dinosaurs roamed. And here was Wayne, returned, his bones asserting themselves as they always had.
I smiled and put down the hoop. He walked over. I placed my hands on the blades of his shoulders. Wayne has a laugh that is something like a chuckle but deeper, a low rich sound whose reverberations fill my body. He lifted me off the ground and twirled me, spinning until we blurred.
Sally (left) quickly becomes Comet’s groupie. donna kane
Twenty-Five
Comet and Sally
After a few days of acquainting Sally with Comet, Comet with Sally, I put them together in Comet’s pen. Almost instantly, she’s fawning. I’m glad they’ve clicked, it’s what I’d hoped for, and the fact that Comet has the upper hand was actually necessary to my plan, but I can’t help feeling just a little annoyed by Sally’s submissiveness. I think again of what Wayne says about horses being a reflection of the human who owns them. Sally doesn’t seem to mind that Comet is the boss; she follows Comet around regardless of how much attention he pays her.
I learn that Comet has a jealous streak. If I brush Sally, Comet wants to be brushed too. When I pitch hay, Comet chases Sally off, and only when I’ve pitched enough hay for both does Sally return. Because of this, I’ve been taking Sally out of the corrals, tying her up to the hitching post in front of the tack shed to brush her, leading her around the yard out of sight of Comet. Which makes her nervous. The house makes her nervous, the trees by the dugout make her nervous. The flowerbeds make her nervous.
One afternoon I saddle Sally and ride her around in the corral. It goes well, but I can tell by Sally’s ears, by her halting movements, that she’s guessing at what I want. I can see I’m not making myself clear. And I know I’m not making myself clear, because I don’t even know what it is that I want. I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do. My friend Joyce says to take baby steps, to take it slow, that the important thing is for both of us to feel comfortable. Emilie is waiting for me to ride Sally across the fields to her house.
The entire summer has been a blur. A few weeks ago we had a thunderstorm that shook the house. Four weeks ago I went to see my kids. Once, while visiting my parents, I tried to wake my father from a nap and couldn’t. I called 911. The ambulance came. “He’s having a stroke,” they said.
“No heroics,” I told them, and I know there was a kind of hysteria in my voice. I said it more than once—“Whatever you do, no resuscitation.” The thought of him paralyzed and spending the rest of his years in a comatose state terrified me. I know he probably didn’t mean it when he asked me to put him out of his misery if he ever got the way he’s become, and that even if he did mean it, he’s no longer the person who once made me promise. But there’s a part of me that thinks, If this is the end, how lucky. It would mean he was going without visible pain; it would mean he’d never have to go into long-term care, something he’d always dreaded. But he does come out of it. At the hospital, in Emergency, his eyes start to flutter and then open. “I’ll bet you thought I was dead,” he says.
The next time Wayne phones I tell him I can’t come to Mayfield. “I can’t leave my mom. And I would never forgive myself if my father dies and I’m not here.” There is a long pause before Wayne responds. “Well,” he says, “you have to do what you have to do.”
“To thine own self be true,” Wayne will say, and what he means is, if you’re not happy doing something, then don’t do it. I knew Wayne would be disappointed that I wasn’t coming in this year. I also knew that if I went through huge machinations to make it work, he’d be happy—but only if I was. Just as he took seriously his own desires and dreams, he assumed that I would as well. It had taken me years to believe that. I was more used to the politeness strategy in which invitations were made as expected gestures, not to be taken seriously. When I first met Wayne, I made all kinds of offers, and Wayne’s response was always, “That would be good.” It had taken me aback, and feeling somehow duped, I’d honour the offer, but then feel bitter about it. “But you offered,” Wayne would say when I’d fall apart over it. Now I know that what he really means is, I have to do what I have to do.
Some days, Comet’s wound looks like a riverbed, all pebbly and log-jammed, the water coursing its way through. Other days it looks more like the bark of a cottonwood tree. His wound, as it heals, grows itchy. When I scratch the hide that edges the wound, Comet’s lower lip drops and quivers with pleasure.
When a wound begins to heal, the undamaged hide gathers itself together and stitches inward, closing in on the wound like fine embroidery, creating at first a thin outside ring of white. So beautiful and precise, that bit of white, so neatly and tightly woven to the edge of the wound, like a moon’s crescent of light and within the wound, the scabs now come off with hardly any bleeding. As I hose, I pull the loose skin off. I rub the wound with my hand to loosen little bits of straw and leaf. I press my hand against the wound. Something about the heat from his body transferring to mine is soothing. Maybe it’s because I am touching something that was once so damaged. I am touching something that is nearly healed.
Twenty-Six
Leading Sally
Over the past few weeks I’ve been turning the garden shed into Sally’s tack shed. Comet’s too. I’ve bought my own halters for both of them, a caddy, my own brushes and oat dishes. I buy wooden letters that spell sally’s shak and nail them to the door. I’ve bought enough to say “and Comet’s too,” but I haven’t had the nerve to put them up. I have been thinking about it, though, of telling Wayne that Comet’s mine.
The other day Emilie drove over and I put a halter on Sally and we walked her back to Emilie’s. We did this so that Sally and I could get used to the route. We travelled west across the road from my house, over the golden stubble of a harvested wheat field, then into the next quarter of land where swaths of canola were drying—we walked along the edge so we wouldn’t damage the crop. We walked over clods of dirt that had been worked up in the spring but not seeded, along a windbreak of poplars and pine trees, then through the brush and out into another field, then across the Rolla Road where vehicles roared along, then into the next quarter section with its swaths of wheat. The whole time Emilie was instructing me on how to lead Sally.
“You need to walk right beside her head,” she’d say. “Don’t let her get ahead of you.” On the trail, the horses know to follow behind. Sally seemed only to want to be ahead of me, and I was constantly trying to stop her, turning her in a circle, and then starting again, the day hot as we continued through the field where we negotiated over and between swaths of grain. To my left I could see the pub and the store, the houses of Rolla and beyond them, to the west, Sweetwater Road and in its distance, Emilie’s ranch. At one point, tired of listening to Emilie’s constant instructions and Sally’s refusal to comply, I flung the lead rope at Emilie and told her to do it herself. It wasn’t my finest moment.
After I’d calmed my
self down, apologized, taken Sally back, Emilie swatting me on the shoulder and laughing, we carried on, but this time Emilie held back. And I slowed down too. I’d been trying to keep up a pace that I thought would help me stay in sync with Sally. I thought Sally was comfortable with walking fast, and I wanted her to be comfortable. But it wasn’t working. A resolve took hold. At the very least, I had to have a pace that was comfortable to me. And then, while I was focusing on that and trying to keep the speed consistent, Sally fell into line, slightly ahead of me, so that I was parallel to her shoulder. I let her. And once that position was established, she kept to it. She didn’t pull on the lead rope; she began to respond to the ebb and flow of my steps.
“You two look good together,” Emilie said, joining us again. Then the three of us, together, walked the rest of the way to her ranch in sync, Sally on one side of me, Emilie on the other.
I watch as horses and riders cross a snowfield.
Twenty-Seven
Season’s End
Whether it is visible or not, a wound is what has been taken away, an absence made present by pain: a failed marriage, the loss of place, a gash to the flesh. As Comet’s wound disappears, he needs me less and less. Healing, it seems, creates its own kind of absence. It is late summer now, the flowers have started to ripen off, the saskatoons along the driveway have shrivelled up, the pods of the caragana are popping, clicking in the late summer heat like a cooling engine. The geese are gathering with their lustrous honking. The cluster of gnats that peppered the air by Sally’s shed all summer long—giving the air muscle and flex, a frivolity to their cloud of barely there, an air of we’re just hanging out, busy at nothing, beach bums of the prairie—have disappeared.
