FIVE

We played the Weyburn Eagles that Saturday, a game we were expected to win. It had snowed on Friday night, five centimeters of snow followed by a few minutes of freezing rain. The field was coated with an icy crust. If we’d been playing in Regina at Mosaic Stadium there would have been a grounds crew to scrape it away, but we weren’t the Roughriders so we played on snow and ice.

By the end of the first quarter, we were down fourteen to nothing. They had a running game that was hard to stop, their fullback a monster who seemed to enjoy running over people. Since he ran straight ahead and seldom made a cut, the snow didn’t bother him. We knew he was going to get the ball a lot, but we couldn’t seem to stop him, not without three or four guys on him, and by then he’d picked up six or seven yards. Our worst problem, though, was my brother. Twice he dropped the ball on the snap. His timing was off; he collided once with Vaughn Foster, our running back — almost knocked him over on the hand-off. He threw an early interception, and after that, he was overthrowing his receivers nearly all the time. When the offence came off, I watched him on the sidelines, receivers and backs around him, while Coach Ramsey drew a play on his chalkboard. Blake looked shell-shocked. He probably heard everything that Ramsey said, but I doubt that he understood a single word.

When the quarter ended and we switched ends, Coach Conley took him aside, the two of them walking down the field, far from where we stood. They had lots of time to talk because the Eagles were on the march again. I don’t know what Coach said to him, but it must have been something special because by the time Blake came back to the rest of us, he looked different somehow, and I heard him yell, “Come on, defence. You can do it.” The first encouragement I’d heard him give all afternoon.

Our guys were up against it now, on our three-yard line. The Eagles had one more down to score. In a situation like that most coaches would kick a field goal, but the Eagle coach had a fullback who could run through a brick wall. He wouldn’t even consider it a gamble.

I could see our whole line crouched in the snow, could almost feel them vibrate with the tension, Ivan Buchko hunched low, waiting to hurl himself forward, Vaughn Foster poised behind him, Vaughn who only played defence when we were desperate. The ball was up, both lines surging forward. The handoff to the fullback, bodies straining, legs churning, Ivan breaking through, falling, an arm around the fullback’s leg, Vaughn hitting the runner in the chest, two more of our guys on him, and he was going down. Stopped. A yard short of the goal. And on the sideline I was cheering, leaping up and down with everybody else.

My brother started onto the field, but Coach Conley stopped him, held him with a hand on his shoulder. “Nothing fancy,” he said. “Up the gut till we’re away from the goal line.”

On the first play, Blake faded back to pass, faked it, saw the centre open up, and ran straight ahead a dozen yards, sliding safely to the snow before they had a chance to hit him. He hopped up, his arm raised for the huddle. He’s back, I thought, we’ve got ourselves a football game. Blake stuck with the running game until we were nearing mid-field, then began working in short passes. Took us down to the twenty before running out of steam, Todd Branton dropping a pass he might’ve caught if he’d been a better player, and we had to settle for a field goal.

Okay, I thought, Blake’s showed us how to do it. We can still win this game.

We did too, twenty-four to twenty-one, that one field goal making all the difference. Jordan Phelps scored twice on passes from my brother; Vaughn Foster got the other touchdown on a run, almost slipping on the ice as he cut over the goal line, but he stayed upright, the ball secure against his chest. I never got to play, but then I didn’t expect to.

“How come he gets to go out?” I asked.

Blake had floated through supper, talking whenever his mouth wasn’t full, laughing sometimes when there was nothing funny, eating way more than usual, still high from leading the come-back on that icy field. Then he’d said that Ivan was picking him up in half an hour, and I’d asked the question.

“His curfew’s over,” said my father. He noticed his fork in his hand, pointed it at me. “Yours isn’t. Not till Monday.”

“That isn’t fair.” I’d been grounded for nearly two weeks, and it seemed like forever. “He’s the one who got drunk.”

My father set his fork on his plate, sharply. It made a sound like a china bell that a grand lady might ring for dinner. Yeah, and we were into proper etiquette, weren’t we though?

“Listen now. There’s something here you need to understand. We don’t condone drunkenness in this family; we just happen to think that fighting’s worse. A lot worse. Is that understood?” My father was wearing his stern face, his eyes grim, unblinking, holding steady on me. I glanced away. Once again I cursed myself for lying about what had happened that night.

Blake was squirming in his chair, looking uncomfortable. The bugger, I thought, he knows how I got the shiner — Ivan must’ve told him.

“Blair!”

“Okay, okay! I understand.”

My mother was leaning across the table, nodding her head.

Yeah, sure, fighting was serious business. I should tell them what went down before her father hit me, let them think about that for a while. Sure, Blake had said he didn’t do it, but I figured the truth was he just couldn’t admit it — especially to his little brother.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’ve got to get ready before Ivan’s pounding on the door.” He shoved his chair away from the table and hurried for the stairs. Yeah, and he’d probably be going to another party, getting sloppy drunk all over again.

I started to get up, changed my mind and settled back into my chair.

“I suppose the next thing we know,” I said, “you’ll want to be out looking for a fatted calf to kill.”

My father laughed, but I was certain I detected a note of bitterness in the sound. “Different circumstances,” he said. “‘This son of mine was dead and is alive again’ — somehow I don’t think the case of the Prodigal Son applies in this instance. Uh-uh, no property squandered here in dissolute living.”

You want dissolute living, I thought, well then, I could tell you a story would shake you to the core.

“If you’re going to start spouting Biblical allusions,” continued my father, “you ought to consider reading the Bible once in a while. I’d recommend chapter fifteen of Luke. Beginning at the eleventh verse. A little reading might open up your mind, maybe even knock it out of that rut you’ve got it stuck in.”

By the time he finished speaking, his voice was sharp as the carving knife he always honed before he cut the turkey on Thanksgiving Sunday.

I couldn’t tell him what I wanted to tell him. All I said was, “I’m going downstairs and watch the hockey game.”

As I left the table, my father, who seldom quoted scripture outside the church, did what struck me as a remarkable thing. “Blair,” he said, his voice assuming the exact tone he used when sharing the peace, “there’s no need to be fighting everything. ‘The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will renew you in His love.’”

I took the stairs two at a time.

Every Sunday after the service, my brother and I were expected to go down to the church hall for coffee with the congregation. It didn’t matter that neither of us drank coffee. We were always stuck drinking watered-down Tang like the little kids from Sunday school. Usually, we sat together at a table off to the side, talking football and hoping that Mr. Hammond would join us with his take on the latest Rider game. He and his wife had season tickets. Today we’d barely sat down before Agnes Bettany headed for our table. She was slight and red-headed, bird-like in her manner, an older woman who hadn’t aged a day since I’d been in kindergarten. My mother thought she didn’t even dye her hair.

“Blair,” said Mrs. Bettany, “you read so very well.” It had been my turn to read the second lesson that morning, and I’d practiced at home as I always did, saying the whole thing out loud. “You put so much feeling into it, it really comes alive.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Bettany. I work at it.”

“Your father should have you read more often,” she added before moving on to another table.

Blake watched her go, a sour look on his face. Uh-huh, I thought, he’s remembering two years ago, when he was one of the readers for the Christmas Lessons and Carols and he screwed it up good, telling us about the wise men opening their treasure chests, offering gifts of gold, and myrrh and Frankenstein.

I thought I’d rub it in. “Nice of her to say so.”

He turned blank eyes toward me. “Who?”

“Mrs. Bettany.”

“What about her?”

“Oh, never mind. You might as well go back to sleep.” He was hung-over again, that must be it.

I saw Mr. Hammond coming our way, coffee cup in one big hand, napkin and cookies in the other. Such a lean body, his hands so large, his voice so deep they always surprised me. He pulled a metal chair out from our table and sat down.

“Morning, boys,” he said, and chuckled. “No, I guess it’s after twelve. My brain is always running late. You make it into Regina for the game last night?”

I shook my head. “No, I had something else I had to do.” Yeah, right, that would be staying at home by myself.

Blake was staring off again, in the direction of Mrs. Bettany.

“Too bad,” said Mr. Hammond. “It was a good game even though they lost. Thirty-one to twenty-eight, lots of action up and down the field. Our guys gave it their best shot, but it’s the same old problem. We need a quarterback you can count on — like Austin in his prime. Somebody like that throwing the ball, we’d really go places.” He took a sip of coffee, seemed to be studying my brother. “Sorry I didn’t make it to your game yesterday. Three hours in the cold is about as much as these old bones can handle in one day. I heard you won though.”

When my brother didn’t respond, I said, “Uh-huh, it was a close one too. Twenty-four to twenty-one.”

“How’d you like playing in the snow, Blake?”

My brother moved his head as if a wasp had buzzed his cheek. “Pardon?”

“Here, have a cookie,” said Mr. Hammond. “Maybe that’ll snap you out of the coma.”

I laughed. My brother just looked puzzled.

Mr. Hammond tried again. “How was it — in the snow?”

“Oh, it wasn’t as tough as I thought it would be. Cold on the hands at first, but not bad once we got going.” Blake’s voice was dull, as if discussing a game that didn’t much interest him. He had the words right, but the feeling wasn’t there, his mood so different from his excitement last night at supper. “Defence won it for us. A big stand on the three-yard line.”

Something’s wrong, I thought, but what is it?

He didn’t look hung-over, and as far as I knew he hadn’t been throwing up last night. At least not at home where I would have heard him.

“You score any touchdowns?”

“Not me, no.” The same dull voice, but then it changed. “Jordan Phelps, Vaughn Foster, they did the scoring.” When he pronounced their names, his tone was sharper, the pitch of his voice higher. I’d never known him to be jealous of other people scoring. I wondered what this meant.

All at once Blake seemed to realize Mr. Hammond was staring at him. “The Riders,” my brother asked, “ how did they make out last night?”

Mr.Hammond turned to me. “I don’t know, Blair,” he said, “but I think you better keep an eye on your brother. He’s slipping back into the coma. Either that, or he’s got himself lost pondering the intricacies of your dad’s sermon.”

He was thinking about something all right, but it sure wasn’t a sermon. I wondered what he’d been up to last night. What kind of trouble was he in now? There must have been something weird going on to make him act this way.

When our father drove the family home from church, Blake sat with me in the back seat, shoulder pressed against the far door, his face turned to the window. Outside, it had begun to snow, large flakes drifting down, hardly a breeze to disturb them as they floated in leisurely spirals like wisps of tissue, settling at last to cover the crust of snow from the day before. Only the middle of October and already our second fall of snow.

“Look at it,” said my mother. “Around here, you seldom see it snow without a wind. Usually a howling wind. It’s beautiful.” She glanced back at Blake, but I don’t think my brother was looking at the snow.

Before I went to bed that night I stood for a long time at my bedroom window. The snow had stopped falling hours ago, but the world outside was white and still, shining under the streetlights. When I switched off the light, the ceiling of my room seemed almost luminescent. I lay down and stared at the dim glow that had to be reflections from the snow outside.

For some reason, I thought of the time my brother took me Christmas shopping at Zellers. I was in grade three and he in grade six. He’d helped me pick out coffee mugs for our parents, nice ones with a Canadian flag on the side; then he left me in the line to pay for them. It was a long line, but I didn’t care. I remember being pleased because the mugs weren’t going to cost as much as I thought they would. I’d have money left over for a chocolate bar.

The next time I saw my brother, a man wearing a tie and vest had him by the arm, was almost dragging him along. They seemed to be arguing. When they got close to me, I heard Blake say, “That’s him — in the green tuque. Just wait till he’s paid. I don’t want him getting lost.”

What’s he talking about, I thought, I’m way too big for getting lost.

The two of them stood there, watching me while the clerk rang up my purchases and counted out my change. They weren’t arguing now. The clerk wrapped tissues around the mugs and slipped them into a bag. I handed her the looney she’d just given me and said, “I’d like a Crispy Crunch too.”

“Come on, kid. We haven’t got all day.” The man sounded angry.

I shoved the bar into my pocket and grabbed my change. “What’s going on?” I asked.

Blake shook his head at me. The man gave his arm a yank and headed toward the other end of the store.

I had to trot along beside them to keep up. “What is it?” I asked.

The man stopped so suddenly, his face so angry when he spun towards me that I ducked my head. I thought he was going to hit me. “Your brother,” he said, “is a lousy thief.”

When he got us to the office he phoned my father, told him his son had been caught shop-lifting a CD, he wasn’t phoning the police this time, but if the boy ever tried it again, there’d be no second chance, the police would be handling the case for sure.

The man was still angry, his knuckles white on the phone, and I thought he really wished he had that hand around my brother’s neck. Then he said something I’ll never forget. “You’re a minister, aren’t you? What the hell do you teach these boys?”

Blake took a step toward him, his face crimson. For a second I thought he might kick the man in the shin, but he stopped after one step. “It won’t happen again,” he said, his voice so low I’m not sure the man heard him.

When the man was finished on the phone, he walked us to Zellers front door and held it open. “Get the hell out,” he said, “and don’t come back.”

“I never did anything wrong,” I said. “I can come — ”

“Shut up!” said my brother, and he started across the parking lot.

I caught up to him and grabbed his arm. “I don’t get it. Why would you — ”

“I don’t know.” He was almost yelling. “Motley Crue — I don’t even like them.” He shook me off and started walking again.

“When we get home you’re really gonna catch it.”

He turned to glare at me. “You think I don’t know that. Come on.”

When we got to the bus stop on the far side of the mall lot, I stopped, but he kept walking.

“It’ll pick us up right here,” I said.

“You think I’m getting on that bus with all those bloody people, you’re crazy.”

There was no one at the stop but us. “What people?”

“People staring.” He glanced back at me, but he never slowed his pace. “Hurry up. We’re walking.”

And we walked all the way home, nearly two klicks it was, the snow on the sidewalks crunching beneath our feet, the sky already darkening, Christmas lights glowing on trees and bushes, red rope-lights curled around the pillars of front porches, a few deer sculpted with wire and silhouetted in white lights as they fed on snow-covered lawns, a three-dimensional manger scene, the Christ Child wrapped in a real blanket and luminous in a box of straw, my brother dragging his feet the closer we got to home, signs of the Christmas spirit everywhere and nothing but grief awaiting him at home, for Blake had brought shame upon our family. I would have volunteered for a spanking if it would have eased my brother’s mind.

When we got home, Blake was summoned to the den and I followed behind until my father shook his head at me and closed the door. I stood in the hall a moment, wondering how he would punish Blake. I should have known he wouldn’t yell at my brother, but I was surprised by the restraint I noted in my father’s voice, the words indistinct behind the door, a steady flow, low and murmurous, the tone as soothing as a massage on aching muscles.

I looked for Anna in the halls at school, tried to run into her, but I never saw her once, not even on Tuesday when I hung around outside her history class until everyone had left the room. Blake gave me a funny look when he came out and saw me standing by the fountain, but he never said a thing, and I sure wasn’t going to ask him where she was.

I first heard the talk on Wednesday morning.

Hurrying down to my locker to switch books between classes, I passed two boys going up the stairs, their voices loud and animated.

“Not in town,” one of them said. “Somewhere out in the country.”

“Jesus. Who would do a thing like that?”

That was all I heard, but I had seen their faces, flushed, excited. I wondered why I felt uneasy.

I pushed through the crowd around the lockers, found my own, began to turn the dial on my combination lock. From behind me I heard someone say, “In a field somewhere. North of town.”

“Dead, you mean?”

“Yeah, they said a body on the radio.”

The lock was shaking in my hand. I tried to hold it steady and work the dial, but the numbers were all wrong.

“It wasn’t that cold last night, was it?”

“I don’t know. But frozen was what they said.”

The numbers on my lock were blurry now. When I turned the dial, they seemed to shift. A girl had joined the group behind me, her voice high and troubled, almost screeching, but I didn’t turn around.

“I heard it was a native — that’s awful.”

“Yeah, you don’t expect it here in Palliser. Maybe in Regina.”

“It’s awful anywhere.” The girl’s voice again.

“They said she’d been beaten.”

“She? You mean it was a girl?”

“According to the radio.”

I quit fooling with my lock, let it fall against the metal door, stood there, my nose almost pressed against my locker, staring at its dented surface, a gun metal grey.

The girl behind me began to sob. I think I knew what she was going to say even before she spoke. “Anna,” she said, “she hasn’t been at school all week.”

I had to get out of there. “Excuse me,” I said, pushing between them, my head down, almost running, wanting just to get away, going back up the stairs, heading for the front door, but no, there were always kids outside, where could I go? The football room, there’d be no one in it now, not a soul, the football room, that was the place. I bumped a kid as I turned into the hallway by the gym, someone I hadn’t seen, almost flattened him against the wall.

“Hey!” he said. It was Evan Morgan. I hardly recognized him. “You hear about that body? It might be someone from our school.”

I grabbed him, gave him a shove along the hall. “No,” I said, “no, it couldn’t be.” I didn’t want him looking at my eyes. Pushing open the door to the football room, I ducked inside. Empty, thank God, it was empty.

The room was a blur. I could barely see where I was going, but I felt as if my body had been set on automatic pilot. My legs walked me across the room to my locker, turned me around, sat me down on the bench where I always sat. Where everybody sat.

“Red meat,” Jordan Phelps had said, “good for the appetite.”

I dropped my head into my hands. “Anna,” I thought, “oh, Anna.” I may have said her name aloud, I think maybe I did, and the next thing I knew, I was bawling like a baby.

By Thursday morning every kid at school knew that Anna Big Sky’s body had been found in a field north of town. Even the teachers knew. On the radio, the T.V., announcers said that a farmer driving on a grid road had spotted the body in a field, but they kept saying no name had been released, the police were waiting for the next-of-kin to be notified. There was no announcement of her name until the news at suppertime that night, and by then the kids at school had already collected over a hundred dollars to buy flowers for her funeral.

I didn’t want to hang around the school that day at noon hour, didn’t want to have to listen to kids going on about someone most of them didn’t even know. I asked Ivan Buchko if I could catch a lift home with him.

“Sure,” he said, “if you don’t mind going the long way around.”

I hopped into the front seat beside him. He was so big I swear the whole car slanted toward his side of the road. I guess I noticed more about the car this time than I had the night we took Amber Saunders home. It was a ’76 Ford LTD, with the front seat shoved back as far as it would go, but Ivan’s huge body was rammed behind the wheel as if he was just some slightly bigger than normal guy who’d crammed himself into an old Volkswagen Beetle. Somehow it was comforting to ride with a guy so big and strong you knew that nobody could ever beat him up and dump him in a field.

Ivan didn’t turn at Huston Way, but kept driving straight up Main Street. “Where you going first?” I asked.

“The old McCauley place.”

“What’s that?”

“Old homestead — well, a farmyard. Where the house and barn used to be. Just trees and bushes now. Not much else. People sometimes go out there to drink.” He looked grim.

“That’s where she got it.”

“Anna?”

“Yeah, Anna Big Sky.”

I felt like asking him to stop the car and let me out, I could walk home. But something kept me seated there, a sense of inevitability I guess you’d call it, a feeling that a chain of events had long ago been set in motion and now something more was going to happen, something I was meant to be a part of.

“How do you know where to go?” I finally asked.

“From the news. I recognized the place.”

Ivan followed the highway that ran straight north of town till we reached a gravel crossroad and he turned east, going fast on the gravel, gravel and snow, the sound of the tires changing as soon as we left the pavement, a dismal wail. Flat prairie stretched ahead of us, and the occasional farm, outbuildings huddled under a thin, white shroud. After a few kilometres I saw the McCauley place ahead of us and knew what it was without Ivan saying a word. The yard was set back from the road the length of a city block, a line of Manitoba maples on either side of the yard, their trunks thick and dark even in the noonday sun. Most of the bigger branches were down, some of them split in two and dragging on the ground though still attached to the trunk, everywhere around them a snarl of broken limbs. Between the rows of Maples was a caragana hedge that looked as if it hadn’t been trimmed in years, the branches wild and tangled, in places stretching a dozen feet into the air.

Ivan pulled onto the side road and stopped the car. From a fence-post right beside the car, a hawk rose into the air, wings beating for an instant, then falling still and silent as it glided toward the McCauley place. It was stupid as hell — I know it was — but I shuddered when I saw the hawk.

“There,” said Ivan, and pointed at the field. Perhaps two dozen metres into the field, an irregular orange rectangle was painted on the snow, fluorescent orange. I’d been looking at the hawk and hadn’t seen it. Spray paint, I thought. Ivan left the car running and we walked into the stubble field, the crust of snow snapping with every step we took, the sun above us almost lost in cloud now, our shadows like dim ghosts moving across the field. There were lines of footprints leading forward, and just as many going back the other way, then a mass of prints in a circle around the orange rectangle which was broken in places where someone had stepped. There were fewer prints inside the circle. We stopped before the paint, hesitant to take another step, as if this were sacred ground where no one dared trespass.

Blighted sunlight, wind beginning to rise, wisps of snow lifting, gathering on the flattened crust, sifting through broken stalks of wheat.

There, where she had lain.

“Poor Anna,” said Ivan.

My eyes were damp. I felt myself moving backward, was afraid I’d start to run.

“Yeah, let’s go.” Ivan, too, had seen enough.

We hurried back to the car. I could feel my shoulders shaking inside my jacket and hoped he wouldn’t notice.

I was still shivering in the warm car.

“Sure as hell,” said Ivan, “they wouldn’t have done it there.”

“They?” My body jerked against the seat.

“Whoever — I don’t know.” He glowered at me. “Nobody’s going to beat her up out there — where any car coming along would see them.” He gestured toward the farm yard. “Behind those trees, that’ll be the place.”

He drove slowly along the narrow road, which was thick with weeds and grass, but not thick enough to prevent you from seeing that other cars had taken the same route. As we passed the caragana hedge, the car bounced beneath us.

“Ditch,” said Ivan. “Somebody dug it right across the road to keep people out. Kids must’ve filled it in years ago.”

Beyond the hedge the yard was full of swaying grass rising at least a metre above the snow, but here and there were tracks where cars had pulled off the road, patches where the grass was trampled down. High on the branch of a broken maple I thought I saw a shadow move. In one corner of the yard, a ring of snow-covered rocks marked an abandoned firepit. Near them, barely visible through the swaying grass, orange paint outlined an awkward circle.

Ivan swung his door open, got out of the car, swung the door shut again. I watched him step toward the circle. Wondered why I was just sitting here, watching him go. Finally, I dragged myself out of the car and followed him to the circle’s edge. Here the grass was trampled, the crust of snow beaten down, but there was no sign of blood. From the edge of the circle, uneven footprints laid down a crooked trail through a break in the maples and out into the stubble field. The trail of someone staggering. Half a kilometre in the direction Anna had taken, smoke rose from the farmhouse she must have seen and tried to reach. Where the trail began, here in the heart of the circle, the snow was stained with urine.