by Patrick Lane
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT
This book is for Lorna.
1
it didn’t take him long to bury me. He scrabbled at the thin till, gravel and chunk clay sprawling out from his cracked shovel and dull pick. The sweatband on his straw hat got darker and darker as he bent to his task, the air heavy with the silt of stars. Heat hung from his neck like a yoke on an ox. The hair on his fingers was matted wool, grains of earth glinting there in the fur, the sky fraught with moon. Two trees leaned their gnarled branches down on him, bitter apples withering, their skin flayed with scab and the froth dust of wormholes, shimmering with bleached light.
He lifted me from the crib where I’d whispered my breath for six long months and rolled me in the sheet Mother had left me lying on when I was born. My baby sweat had marked the cloth a yellowed grey. I loved him holding me. He bound me tight in thin cotton and lifted me onto a leftover square of tent canvas, folding me up. My body moved light as a bird carcass among his fingers.
Fold upon fold.
I watched from a branch of the apple tree in the neglected orchard, his little Alice, and knew the tears were flowing down the inside of his skull, his dark eyes dry as glass. What he worked to bury he’d thought was his to hold. I knew he was imprinting my body onto the skin of his hands and whatever he was to bear in the days and nights he had left, be it axe or gun, hammer, wheel, or wonder, it would be me he was holding, the dead daughter who had followed hard on the heels of Rose, the first girl-child to go to earth, and me to follow, his second to last.
We were the between children, Rose and me. Before us was the one she wanted, Eddy, and two years later Tom, the afterthought boy no one planned. My mother loved Eddy, her first son, and for her, her only one. The baby who came after all of us was of another mother, a daughter born without a name.
Father said Mother killed both Rose and me from malice and deliberate neglect, but the truth was different. Mother had only emptiness in her for her kind. That she said she was in a dark place after our births doesn’t change what she did and didn’t do. Her heart beat for her first son, Eddy, and when he came, she was at last at least happy. He would become for her the lover she was sure of, a boy, an almost man. Little Rose lived only a week, and me for nine days shy of half a year. Every day and night of those long months was a journey toward my grave. It was a long road I travelled in that crib, no help from Mother, who said she sickened at our births. There was only care from Tom and it not enough to keep either of us whole. I suckled on cow’s milk he’d soaked a rag in, a tag-end of cotton the nipple I knew. Little Rose had refused what he tried to give. Born for death, she went willingly to it. Tom tried to touch us clean, the only one who did.
Poor Mother. What milk she had came out white as water run through alkaline clay. I tasted her for a day or two, no more, her milk strained into a cup she, grudging, gave to Eddy, who gave it to Tom. That she denied me had to do with her dreams, where and who she came from. The past makes us what we are. We fail daily in our desire to be whole. Mother and Father’s lives were always less.
It’s the mirror of things torments us in the night. We imagine ourselves when we cry out at the coming darkness. In the day we see ourselves in what and who is closest to our grief. Night and day Mother saw herself in me, saw the little girl she once was looking back at her, and though she was wrong in what she imagined, it didn’t change her. It was the same with Rose. Mother wouldn’t go near her. She said it was impossible for her to see such a thing come out of her, sticks for legs and a swollen belly, eyes clamped down and a skin rope around her neck. She looked at who Rose was and would be, and couldn’t bear it. It was the same with me. I can’t bear it, Mother would say to Rose when she came into the crib room, Eddy small beside her. Why are you alive? Father picked up Rose when she was three days old and laid my sister’s tiny body upon Mother’s belly in the hope she might put it to her breast. Take her away, Mother said to Father, and he did, Little Rose’s lungs whistling, gone poorly from the cord that had strangled her coming out. Her breathing was a slow and laboured song. She lasted seven days, Tom slipping into the crib room to stroke her red skin, her green-stick bones, wetting her lips with the milk she never licked down. Rose stared past him at the walls, her tiny fists clenched tight.
While Rose lay dying, Father stormed. Both Eddy and Tom walked careful as he did, hiding where they could when he fell into a rage. There were stuttering fires going off inside him. They’d both seen them, outcries only Father knew, flaring in him like bad stars. They watched their father from afar, spying out his moves, his silences, his drunken wildness when the anger came up, the solitude he seemed to treasure. The night he finished burying Little Rose the boys peered through the cracked boards in the root cellar roof and watched him piss on the tattered corn. His heavy cock frightened them, the thick whorl of his water bubbling in the dirt. Staring, they couldn’t see themselves the same, something unimaginable in their childish eyes.
Father had come in to see Rose every day while she still breathed. He didn’t touch her but for the one time he gave her to Mother, only gazed through the bars as she sank deeper away. His stillness there seemed to the boys what care might be, never having known it for themselves.
A Wednesday to a Wednesday, and as Mother said to Father when Rose breathed her last: Wednesday’s child is full of woe. Father cried out at those words and held them over Mother from that day forth.
I followed close on Rose, Father pinning Mother’s body and laying inside her the seed that would give him the daughter he wanted. Mother trying to hold him off was to no avail. He parted her legs with his rough knees and rode until his need took hold. Her revenge was sweet. The egg she gave him was as weak as the one before.
It was different earlier when she’d wanted a son. She’d waited through three years of wandering the West. He brought her to the valley then. A week after moving into the house on Ranch Road her egg was ready and she trapped Elmer when he was falling-down drunk, pushed him down in the empty living room onto the red fir floor, and pulled him into her. He’d shouted out but there’s no stopping a man’s body though the man might want it otherwise. Who knows who he yelled for? Father cursed his lust, but drunk as he was he couldn’t stop her.
So she said.
Who was she trying for but a boy? She climbed off him with a terrible smile after he spilled and lay there on his back, his hardness fled from him, her thighs wet with his leavings.
That was Eddy and the story of his making.
Mother said she was delirious with fever the year after Eddy was born when Father had his way with her, and Father said he was passed out drunk the night Tom was conceived. They both lied as they always had. After Eddy, there was a need for Tom though they didn’t know it. They didn’t know what he would be or what he’d do in the years, but there was something in him that made them wonder. To them he was unlike, but unlike who or what? Tom had in him a weighted wish they might have called a heart had they known how to speak of it. But how was Tom to know anything of that? He was simply there, a baby, then a boy. What child k
nows to ask who he is? Eddy saw their confusion at this second son. He loved Tom for his burden. There are some who must do the world’s work. Tom had in him the spirit of a crow and the heart of a wren. He was born to blood and hiding.
When Father carried me out among the last few apple trees, he didn’t know Eddy and Tom were watching. Deep in the orchard he placed me on a fleece he’d cut that spring from a lamb. Then he took three bluebird feathers from his hatband and stuck them into the canvas shroud that covered me. Father dug my grave as he did Little Rose’s, each scrape with his hands, each shovelful measured against Mother’s failings. He said she wanted me dead, but he was wrong. She just didn’t want me in the world she wept in. He said Mother wasn’t worthy of a girl, and no matter his protestations of love for the daughters he never seemed destined to raise, he believed Mother killed with her outright neglect any daughter he might’ve had grow into a woman to look after him in the years to come. His dying days were around him, just not known. Cluttered gravel and hard clay surround my bier just as they do the body of my sister.
This is a desert land and good earth is hard to find. Withered apples hung above Father’s head as he placed me in the hole he’d dug and whispered what words he had. I lay on the lambskin and watched him place his face in his rough palms. It was a wonder to him to taste salt water for the first time since he was a boy.
Father had set at Rose’s tiny head a river stone. Rose quartz, it blistered with bruised light. Mine would be an alien stone dropped by a glacier in the days when the earth was ice, blue as the sky in the hour before the dawn. He said his sister loved blue stones. He named me for her: Alice. He’d found the stone in the hills above Sugar Lake and brought it to the field, the weight of it hanging from his hard arms. It lay above me solitary as a coyote that’s missed its prey.
Oh, my sisters, the stories swirl. They are wrong water trapped by rocks. The words I was told turn on themselves. There were nights Father sat by the humped blue stone at the head of my grave with his whiskey bottle in his fist and told me tales. He talked to me, but sometimes I think it was as easily the night. When the moon was full, he’d stagger out from the root cellar and come to the orchard singing some country song from the years, “Cowboy Jubilee.” “Tumbling Tumbleweed.” When he was settled on the ground, he’d drink and mumble about the days when he was a boy. He felt safe out there with me. I was the daughter he thought he’d known. The past he gave me was the only gift he had beyond the blue feathers he stuck into my shroud, the stone he laid for me.
His oldest stories were told to him by his mother. I had only been in the earth a week when he remembered for me the time of his grandmother. She was a little girl coming up out of the Montana Territory back in the last century. There were three wagons and three families. His grandmother was seven years old when she saved the pup from her father, who wanted to eat it.
Father turned silent when he said that. It was like he expected me to question him, but who was I to speak? I lay in my grave and waited until he began again. It was a long story told through a bottle. Most of his stories were. Sometimes he’d stop and rage at those days, angry at a world he thought had done him wrong. And sometimes he’d stop in the telling and stare into the dirt as if an answer was there if only he could find it. He’d poke his finger among pebbles and rearrange them into squares and circles or push them into tracks of dust. He’d look long at what he’d made and then scatter the gravel with his boot. Who knows what he saw there, what he was thinking in the night.
He told me each family dug a hole in the earth at the southern lip of the Great Sandhills, winter coming before summer was full over, the blizzards seething without respite. They were trapped two hundred miles from where they were headed. Three wagons and the snow piled up in drifts, the ground beneath their feet stiffened sand that froze in grotesque crystals, chunks of meteors they thought were buried angels, the way they sparkled in the sun. They’d eaten what they could of the animals, the rest stolen by cats and wolves. The women and children lay in their holes in the ground and heard the howling from above while the men climbed ladders made from alder trunks and leather thongs, wasting bullets on wraiths come out of the dunes, grey wolves whose hunger became the sound of snow falling.
Three families and early winter in the Territories. Fort Macleod lay far ahead of them, a place made impossible by snow. Each night of the journey they’d sat around their fires and spoken of the dream, the land they’d break, the wilderness turned into something they could own, a farm, a ranch, a barn, a home. It was 1886, my father said, just thirteen years after American wolvers massacred the Assiniboine in the Cypress Hills. They’d risen in the night to kill the men who’d stolen their horses, but that was likely a lie, Father said. I think they just wanted to shoot some Indians, he told me.
Sometimes I think the only truth he knew was the past, the stories like the mazes he made with pebbles in the sand. He said the families had come up out of the Territories across the old Medicine Line and crossed over to the dry lands north of the Cypress Hills against all common sense, the Frenchman River south the safer, surer way, ready water and wood, the hills to protect them from storms. He never told me why they left so late, August no time to start such a journey. It seems there are no stories but those where a hand touches a rein and a horse turns its head, the animal knowing what the man does not, asking with its glance why they are leaving grass and water for a desert. The first storm came down from the north like a millwheel into their lives. It caught them when the moon turned August into September. They’d travelled a bare nine miles in the snow before they stopped, two of the horses dead under the whip, broken in the hip-high drifts.
Father would mutter, then lift his bottle of whiskey. He’d hold it up to the moon. He liked to look through it to the false light as he listened to the wind in the bunch grass. He said the men tied the wagons together, the last horses kept alive into December, when what feed they had was gone, only melted snow for water, and they began to shoot the animals, one by one, trying to live off the meat. Each night they left a man in the snow to guard the dwindling stock against the predations of the wolves. What they didn’t bring down into their holes was left for the wild ones, offal and bones, bits of tattered hide. Their hunting was next to nothing, a rare antelope, jack rabbits, until even they were gone. A skinny deer or two, no more, and all the while digging their holes deeper to keep alive, canvas and blankets stretched across alder sticks their roof. Father said the blizzard wind is a ghost that eats you, fallen snow lifted from the drifts to fly again.
When his mother told him the story, she used to smile when she got to the part about that little girl hiding from her father night after night and him never finding her or the pup. He said his mother chuckled to tell it, his great-grandfather dreaming of that dog, nothing to scavenge but bones strewn from the wolves foraging above the hole he’d dug.
Father would go quiet then. He always did when he talked about his mother. His voice would lull away and then he’d mumble into his hands. For god’s sake, he’d say, it was cold and the months dragged on, the meat gone and the families living on hope, dry wood nowhere to find, their fires mean, the earthen rooms clogged with rancid smoke. Mealy flour, dried beans and peas, and not much more. I can smell it, he’d say, and then he’d lay his hand on the stone he’d placed for me and say: But I bet you want to know what happened to the little girl who was my grandmother? He’d wait then, his ear cocked to the moon. When there was no answer, he’d go on.
Well, he’d say, she’d been allowed to choose one thing to take with her on the trek to Fort Macleod. One thing only, there being little room on the wagon for incidentals, and of all things possible she chose a pup. Then in late February, she woke up one night to find her father trying to steal it up the alder ladder so he could kill the dog away from her, they were that hungry. The puppy’s squeal, its whine or whimper, woke her and, sullen, he gave it back. She knew the pup would die if ever she let it out of her sight.
; She carried that puppy from ladder to hole, family to family, night after night, three and sometimes two steps ahead of her father. She kept it alive a month and more till the end of March when their smudge was spotted by a band of passing Cree who dropped an antelope carcass down their smoke hole. Three times the Indians came by with meat, but nothing was said, the families huddled in their caves, listening to the soft sound of the hooves of the unshod horses in the snow.
What happened, how they made it through to Fort Macleod after that winter of ’87 in the Great Sandhills, was never told. Their trek on foot that spring through the dry-lands where the bones of dinosaurs grew like nightmares from the sand, their wandering west through nameless grasses that rose above their waists, the cats and wolves and rattlesnakes, weren’t the stories that tormented him. It was that little girl, her pup, and the father who hunted in the dark. This story always made him smile when he told it.
There were nights he couldn’t sleep when he’d come out to us and nights he never tried to sleep, him and his shotgun. He’d stand under the apple trees and try to shoot the stars. He’d aim at the moon and try to kill it. He’d shout about his sister, his leaving her behind so many years ago when he ran away from his father, his mother slipping him out the door before the dawn while his father slept.
Father and his stories of the past.
I remember the night I was buried, remember the stones and pebbles falling upon me. There was no moon when I left my flesh behind and travelled over the dry grass of the orchard graveyard. I crossed with Father over the gravel he’d strewn to keep the weeds down in spring, the yellow poppies in the yard parting before his boots. I went from my grave to the house where Mother was sleeping. Seeing her there, I thought a mother’s love is strong and sometimes death is love enough.
Mother’s father had hanged himself in their barn, the crops dead in the fields three years and the last steers sick with Wooden Tongue from eating thistles he’d foraged from the fields. She’d watched her father’s body swing above the rats come out to feed on the handful of grain he’d scattered in bitterness, as if to say what they had was worthless, only good for vermin.
