• Chapter 10 •

Mac takes time for a short nap to settle his Kraft Dinner. After building the owl cage, he needs a bit of a rest, especially if they are going to walk any distance in the coulee.

He pulls on the lever of his La-Z-Boy. Soon he’s fast asleep, but then the dreams come: images of testimony, police and courtrooms.

The policeman said:

I saw some blood on his nose

and in his mouth and it was

bubbling from breathing….

The lawyer said:

Oh, he was breathing…?

The policeman said:

Yes he was, and I could also

see a pulse beat in his throat….

Mac wakes, the same instant clutching the footrest handle on the chair, bolting himself upright. He goes to the bathroom and runs cold water, splashing it on his face and the back of his neck. He puts his hand on his chest to feel his heart racing as if out of control, and he’s breathing just as fast. He’s got to get out of the house for some fresh air, out of the house to clear his head of its demons.

With his hands gripped to the steering wheel, he’s tense, but at least he feels some control. He feels more at home in the cab of his truck than he does in his own living room. Shevchenko’s poems have relaxed him before; the book is somewhere in the truck. Then he spots Angela waiting for him on the sidewalk in front of her house.

“I’ve brought my sketchbook along,” Angela says. “Mother says that Bone Coulee might inspire me.”

“She’s not coming with us?”

“I didn’t ask her. Mother’s just as happy to stay home and watch Coronation Street.”

If it hadn’t have been for the university professor last summer explaining to Mac the significance of Bone Coulee, he’d feel damned uncomfortable. He’s nerved-up as it is with his dreams, and a man with any blood at all in his veins, no matter how old, can’t help but squirm when he sneaks a side glance at the blue jeans on the seat beside him. She being Aboriginal, at least they have a legitimate reason to drive out to Bone Coulee. They have artistic reasons; she has her sketchbook, and if he really wants to get down to it, Mac has his book of Shevchenko poems, if that is legitimate.

“Mother says the coulee is filled with spirits.” Angela stares out the side window. “Even these stubble fields that are no longer prairie, that no longer nurture buffalo….”

“And the empty farmyards,” Mac says. I remember when they contained families.” Mac feels the spirit of the pioneers; cream separators, pitchforks, a dance at Buffalo Hollow.

The school is gone, but the yard is still there, and it’s put to use. Provincial regulation requires the containment of empty herbicide and pesticide containers, so the municipality has constructed a chain-link fence around the property. It overflows with twenty-litre plastic pails, jugs, cardboard boxes filled with plastic jugs, plastic bags that could fill a truck box filled with jugs.

“Stop,” Angela says. “I’ll do a sketch.”

“It used to be I might buy a pail of 2,4-D,” Mac says. “ Maybe two. Maybe some Avadex for the wild oats. And that’s it.”

“Chemical Mountain,” Angela says.

Achieve Extra Gold, Reglone,

Lorsban, Pursuit, Bravo,

Pursuit Ultra, Poast Ultra,

Odyssey, Lontrel,

Frontier, Roundup….

“A landscape for Picasso,” Angela says.

“Modern art stuff, eh? All mixed up in bits and pieces.”

DyVel, Eclipse, Edge,

Freedom Gold, Horizon,

Rustler, Admire, Muster Gold,

Muster Gold 11, Pinnacle,

Harmony....

Angela sketches one page, and then another, and another, all from different angles. “Chemical Mountain. I’ll call it Chemical Mountain. The pile reminds me of Picasso’s Guernica,” Angela says. “And Zyklon B from the Farben gas chambers, where the Bayer company, and Hoechst, got their start. Phizer. Monsanto.....”

“You learn that at art school?”

“I took a modern European history class.”

Prevail, Puma, Pea Pack,

Gaucho Canola System,

Decis, Cygon/Lagon/Hopper Stopper,

Pounce....

“You can now get Roundup in 450-litre tanks,” Mac says. “They’ll even deliver it to the farm now, in the big tankers.” Just like they do gasoline and farm diesel.”

As they near the trail that leads down to the old Chorniak homestead, Mac notices a blue truck parked along the top of the hill. He figures that it has to be Andy McGuire, the stonemason from Bad Hills. He drives a little faster to see how much the workman has done on the cairn.

“G’day to ya, Mac,” Andy says, as if to honour the name. “And I see ya ga’ someone wi’ ya.” He rips open a bag of mortar mix and dumps a portion into a pail. Andy came over from Scotland during the Grant Devine years to do the greystone work on the university’s new agriculture building. He’s retired now, living in Bad Hills, from where he finds himself being called upon to build cairns for old school sites all over the province.

“Be done by nightfall,” Andy says. “Then the plaque is all.”

“Looks like you’re doing a fine job, Andy. By the way,” Mac says, “you haven’t happened to notice anybody snooping around here? Municipality work truck?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Well, we better get on our way. Don’t want to hold you back from your work.”

“Aye, you don’t that,” Andy says.

It has been a long fall, with the grass staying green and the trees still leafed out in an array of colours: yellow, brown, orange and red. The chokecherry bushes are covered with clusters of overripe, wrinkled berries. Mac parks by the ash grove, and he and Angela get out to walk along the floor of the coulee, south, towards the tipi rings and the rock on which Indian women centuries ago scraped buffalo hides. Angela runs her hand along the rock’s smoothness.

“You know what they used this rock for?” Mac says.

“Yes, to clean the hides.”

He watches her hand caress the rock, and he watches the movement of her slender wrist. If only he were young again. What must be going through her mind? She must feel the mystery down here, like Taras Shevchenko felt the mystery of his dispossessed homeland. Shevchenko wrote of himself as a boy, watching the lambs in the landlord’s meadow, and dreaming of a childhood sweetheart:

She spoke a soothing phrase,

and gently dried my weeping eyes,

and kissed my tear-wet face….

A buck deer appears out of nowhere, its nose sniffing the ground. It runs helter-skelter, head swinging back and forth across the ground like a minesweeper. He’s in rut, with his neck glands swelled and throbbing. Zigging and zagging, he runs to disappear into the brush along the base of the buffalo jump. Moments later, a doe appears out of the willows, running across the coulee floor and up the west hillside, the buck in pursuit.

“Catch that on a movie camera!” Mac says.

Mac and Angela walk back to the ash grove. The air within the grove has a forest smell, and the ground is a soft carpet of matted leaves. The tree trunks bend askew and are covered with bumps. Angela brushes away some leaves to expose the flat rocks of an old foundation.

“My grandmother lived here,” Angela says.

“My late wife and I used to picnic down here,” Mac says. “She was Irish, and she said to be down here reminded her of Ireland’s magic bogs and the leprechauns.”

“Like Mother said, the spirits….”

They walk down to the boggy creek bed, wet from the trickle of a hidden spring. During the spring melt, the water flows in a regular current to the stink lake. A hundred years ago, before the prairie was plowed up, the creek flowed throughout the summer. Mac recites lines memorized from a Shevchenko poem:

“…listen through the years

To the river voices roaring,

Roaring in my ears….”

“I saw your poetry book in the truck. Is that one of the poems?”

“Part of one. I’ll get it if you’d like to hear the whole thing.”

“Sure, as soon as I finish my deer sketch.”

Mac waits, sitting in the truck. There’s no fool like an old fool, he thinks, to be reciting poetry like a Ukrainian minstrel. He studies the lines, reading to himself to find meaning in his own fields and hills, and how after half a century of working them, he has to leave them. It makes him wonder sometimes that the only thing that hasn’t left him is his memory of the bloodshed in his life.

He walks back down, and Angela’s finished the drawing. She shows the buck’s antlers erect, the doe at his side, nosing the swollen glands on his neck. She closes her sketchbook, and tells Mac that she’s ready to listen to him read.

“When I hear the call

Of the raging flood,

Loud with hated blood,

I will leave them all,

Fields and hills; and force my way

Right up to the Throne

Where God sits alone;

Clasp his feet and pray….

But till that day

What is God to me?

Bury me, be done with me,

Rise and break your chain,

Water your new liberty

With blood for rain.

Then, in the mighty family

Of all men that are free,

May be, sometimes, very softly

You will speak of me?”

“So very sad,” Angela says.

“There’s no raging flood in this creekbed,” Mac says. “Let’s hike up a way, and we might find some arrowheads.”

“You’d just take them?”

“I have a whole collection. You should see my rumpus room.”

They don’t find any artifacts, but their walk is not wasted. It’s warm, but not too warm. A rabbit hops in and out of a clump of brush. Crows flock in swirls, over one bluff and on to another. A porcupine hangs from a limb, as if clinging for dear life. Yet the surrounding branches are all stripped of their bark, so if the porcupine is in danger of falling, fear hasn’t prevented it from eating its fill.

When they get back to the buffalo jump, Mac notices that some dirt has fallen away, and a small stone object protrudes from the bank.

“Will you look at this?” he tells Angela. “Talk about artifacts!” He holds a carved figurine in the palm of his hand. It is the shape of a duck’s head: the slope of its beak, little circles for eyes, grooves on each side of its mouth and an indented band around its neck.

“Put it back,” Angela says.

“Are you crazy?”

“It belongs here. Someone must have worn it. Would it have been rolled up in a medicine bundle and buried here? I could ask an Elder.”

“I’ll take it to the university,” Mac says, putting the relic in his pocket. “It’s time we headed back to town.”