IN 1911 my grandfather Eudoras filed title on land and was granted section 13, township 29, range 19, west of the third meridian, and settled there in the cold clean heart of what John Palliser called the “Central Desert,” and within a year he’d built a modest cattle ranch—the Square H, initialled after his wife, Helen—along a string of such spreads lining the river all the way to Alberta. Most of the land and all the cattle are gone now but the house still stands on the north bank of the South Saskatchewan River, fifteen miles south of Mayford, and it’s where I grew up and have lived most of my thirty-few years.
The difference between living as we imagine and living as we do is that one allows for compromise. Unless you value your imaginings there’s a coldness to this fact, and maybe there’s a coldness to it anyway, so I wonder sometimes how Eudoras felt when it became obvious he’d erred in claiming too little pasture and no farmland, a concession to the comfort of limitation in the face of boundless opportunity. Marius inherited the entire parcel at a time when small ranches were selling to larger operations or, more commonly around here, converting to farms, but because he revered provisions for times ahead he hung on until the times themselves were gone. Lucky for me I have no taste for sad retrospectives.
But whatever the complex and contradictory reasons we tell stories for—to make sense or escape it—and whether or not the stories are letter-true, once an order of events has been worked through, there’s no losing the simple consoling fact of our having it to carry with us and, maybe just this once, to lay down for someone else.
When I was four the neighbour’s eight-year-old, Alan Nash, ventured into our yard with a .22 rifle and shot the windows out of a huge old Dodge sedan we had sitting on blocks in our yard. What he didn’t know was that the night before, my dad, Marius, had come home drunk and been locked out of the house by my mother, and was sleeping off the drunk inside the car when the bullets arrived. He scrambled out, still drunk, I suppose, and now bleeding from glass cuts, and saw Alan hightailing for home, and took after him. Alan was naturally scared out of his few wits and when it was quite apparent he’d never make it home, he turned and levelled the rifle on Marius and told him to stop. But Marius didn’t stop, and Alan pulled the trigger—I remember this point came up several times in my brother Eugene’s retelling over the next weeks—but the rifle was spent and Marius caught him and laid a beating on him that I frankly can’t imagine, for he never once struck me or Eugene, and when he stopped, Alan was unconscious. After a moment of surely terrible revelation, Marius lifted him in his arms and turned to take him back to our house and found my mother running towards him. She’d heard the shots and been watching the rest from the house. And it was my mother who carried Alan back to our house and called the doctor in town and Alan’s dad, Mike.
Eugene and I heard the rest from the top of the stairs and put together the picture of the scene from what we could guess and what we found. Blood on the chesterfield where Alan came to consciousness before his dad arrived, and where he cried almost silently while my mother sat with him and held her hand to his head and said “thank you dear Lord” when he woke. Blood on the kitchen chair where Marius sat wordless. A lone button torn loose from a dress in the front doorway from some rough handling between my mother and Mike when he arrived and collected Alan while she pleaded for him to wait for the doctor. There was no confrontation with Marius. When the doctor came, my mother sent him over to the Nash house.
Life between Marius and Mike seemed to go on as usual. No one spoke of the event, at least not around Eugene or me. Within a few weeks, the two families had even agreed upon a land transaction that saw most of our best pasture land, little though it was, sold to Mike for an undisclosed price.
And that could be the end of the story. Or it could lead to another, though there is not enough known cause in these matters alone for the effects that follow.
One afternoon in the February after Alan’s beating my mother sent Eugene and me to our naps, got into the newest family car, a rusting old Buick Marius had bought from some farmer, and drove it out onto the river and through the ice. Most people around here still believe she had some place to go that day. People drove across the river every winter—they still do—but it had been strangely warm for ten days and no one had tried a crossing in a week.
I spent a few days in my room with Eugene, and the morning he went back to school I was allowed on the bus with him. The two of us lived in town with our Aunt Cora for a few weeks. Marius didn’t visit us. Years later Cora told me that he just disappeared for a while, and she wasn’t sure at the time whether he’d ever show up again.
Only last year I asked Cora if she had any idea why her sister had driven onto that river and she asked, “Why would you think there was any one reason?” and I have come to think there really is nothing to be recovered from my mother’s death. It’s one of those large events that we are best not to find precise terms for. It’s both a secret and a mystery, and those are terms enough.
Before me is the one-storey, two-winged brickwork, the two wings squared hard as a bad rhyme. I haven’t worn a watch in years but I know I’m late again in that no one’s hanging around outside the school. By now my classes know enough to go where they’re supposed to, and cover for me if the weaselturd Principal Basso comes by. I sneak in through the industrial arts shop entrance and breeze down the hall to the last pre-exam class of the absurdly broad Grade 12 history: Europe to North America—1750-1950.
The students, occupied with their study groups, barely notice me when I come in.
There are questions.
“Is it ‘Riel Rebellion’ or ‘Red River Rebellion’ or ‘Red River Riel Rebellion’?”
“Have you told us everything?”
We spend a few minutes straightening out names and marrying facts. When I went to school here June exams didn’t matter quite so much—the end of a school year was a twilight season of wandering devotions—but these students have become outright fearful, none of the expected roosting. For me, their dread is all that staves off the usual term-end screaming boredom. Right now it doesn’t matter where we might find history’s heart, or whether history is best thought of as a continuum or an ongoing shtick or some high drollery in bad taste. What matters is each kid whose future now suddenly lies away from the farm, away from town. Thirty years back, the graduating classes were sixty students deep. Fifteen years ago my class was thirty-five. The last three years there have been exactly fourteen and I’m looking at twelve, every one of whom will go on to university or trade school in Saskatoon or Medicine Hat, though most or all would rather stay home on the farm or in town. Even so, they have learned enough to know there are many worse times and places to begin a life. Frankly, they are better prepared for whatever lies ahead than I was at their age. By now there is not much these kids need to be told about the sad ironies of history.
When they are back at work I take a minute to read the morning’s other piece of mail, a letter from Dr. Lucas of the University of Alberta. He notes with great interest my findings and observations about native peoples in the South Saskatchewan River valley. Of course, areas of activity are common throughout the valley. They are surprisingly easy to find and, in fact, are more often found accidentally by farmers and gamesmen than by so-called “experts” such as himself.
Please believe me when I say that your knowledge of Plains Indian culture is impressive, but unless you are willing to be specific as to your reasons for suspecting a burial ground is identifiable, I cannot, I am afraid, lend you my expertise. Either one has evidence or one does not. Perhaps you should keep in mind that such valleys were wintering areas for various tribes over hundreds of years. If you have an artifact, it is likely valuable and of interest to me, but it is also likely not unique or particularly early in terms of the time scheme with which we are dealing. Thank you for writing, but please tell me more.
Precisely my appeal to the grasslands and cliff walls, please tell me more or lead me to luck—not to good fortune—but luck. I talk to you to charm you so you might charm me.
Not long before he left home for good, Eugene told me about an Indian burial ground he’d found somewhere in the river hills near our home in the valley, and he gave me a pendant he said he’d found beside the completely intact skeleton. Only a couple of years ago I started looking for the grave. That it should be in the hills is unusual. The Plains Indian tribes usually practised tree-perch burials or flatland burials in the ground or cairns, or in the few hills they might be near, but if it is in the valley hills then it makes sense no one’s found it. No one looks there. Deer hunters stake the draws, people look down from buffalo jumps, but only I systematically scale the walls and search each bluff. I’ve suffered startled badgers and skunks, diving hawks, cloudbursts with no cover, hundreds of deep cactus wounds, more than one bullsnake. I’ve found so many arrowheads and shards of stonehammers that I don’t even pick them up any more. I’ve mapped the variant folds, marked the safest routes and the yet untried ones. These were nomadic people. Impermanence was their natural state. Nothing bound them—no place, no shared languages, no written words. But earth itself locates the dead and unless I see the grave or a trace of it, even Eugene will inevitably become as transitory to me as the Plains tribes are to the rest of us. The ground I look for is his because he told me about it.
“Have you told us everything?”
It’s the only question left for them. The honest answer is no.
“Of course not. And no one ever will, get used to it.”
It’s occurred to them, I’m sure, that I withhold certain accountings, namely those of local and recent history. But what could I tell, or how?
A shoetree sits on my bedroom windowsill, blind to the southern view that Marcie, a city girl, never appreciated. Just visible from the window is the place where I would stand fishing every fine Saturday from May to August on the eastern tip of the sandbar. I’d wade to the island through a small channel, usually about chest-deep, and walk through a dense strip of seven-foot saplings, coming then to a long stretch of dark brown sand broken cleanly in places by bluffs and less certainly by deer and coyote tracks. I’d keep my tackle in a cropping of weeds. There is something ritualistic in all this, of course, but it wasn’t as if I found solace in the routine, I just enjoyed fishing. Around four p.m. I would go home, and sometimes return in the evening to watch the birds. In the fall they touch down by the thousands, all around.
The first time I got drunk enough to fall asleep on the island Marcie guessed I’d been swept away, and when I hadn’t returned by sunset she phoned our neighbour, Alan Nash. I remember him waking me from one of the deepest sleeps I’d ever had. I don’t recall him saying anything at first, though I guess he must have called out, but he was leaning over me, the folds in his jacket holding silver against the night sky. When I came to, he stood, and above him was the Great Bear, and for a moment I wasn’t sure which one had wakened me.
As we waded back across the channel I was struck by the drunken strangeness of the moment. Alan’s presence had revealed to me a contrary absence in the black above, and beneath the river’s surface, and between the two of us, and I knew something important was upon me, a near understanding of life’s insuperables. Out there was a great landscape lit only by the desperate light that shines on the walls of prairie homes, some of it escaping through windows and out into impossible odds. But Alan wasn’t the sort you’d reveal thoughts like that to, and we didn’t say much until we got to his truck. Then he slapped his hand on the hood and said, “This is stupid, Toss. I can’t let this happen to any of us. I know what’s being said but we didn’t do anything. I don’t love Marcie, Toss. It’s not something that happened.” My condition exempted me from any vocal response, though I understood that something nasty was loose in the universe. The question was whether or not this news should surprise me.
He dropped me off and I went straight upstairs to my room. I heard Marcie phoning to thank him, the dial’s recoil spelling out his name, and I thought of circles, of how they are essentially meaningless. Of how, when measured against the flight of the sun, the river can be seen to run counter-clockwise, exactly the sort of loaded abstraction that takes hold in me for a long time.
Ten miles east of my place the loam soils below the hills give way to scrubland that has flooded since the river was dammed and the flats east of town were drained, the water having slowed into narrow channels, shallow and good for no one but water-skiers and cattle, both mosquito-bitten from head to mudcrust. It’s the single best place I know of to find deer or gamebirds or coyote tracks. I once saw a water-skier in an orange wetsuit spray water from a snigh into low-cropped trees near the bank and send up five nervous Hungarian partridges. I knew the skier but didn’t tell him about the birds because from then on he would likely have carried a gun while in tow. The place wouldn’t normally afford so much of a sporting chance given the numbers of animals but because of the water there isn’t much hunting in the area. Each summer it seems more of a preserve. Everyone calls it the ditch, and it’s the setting for last night’s finding.
“What I heard, it was wolfkill,” Colin Blizanken tells everyone gathered outside the main entrance at recess. “Except,” he pauses portentously, “there’s no wolves.”
“Right, Colin,” says the mocking Zinvalena, “so it must’ve been a werewolf. Don’t be so thick.”
Kevin McCormac thinks maybe a few small grey aliens pulled another mutilation stunt like they did back in ’79. Kevin is the seventeen-year-old father of a son who will one day be visited by poor study skills and a fascination with the bra lines on the girl in front of him.
“You think it was the bug-eyed Martians, Mr. Ray?” asks Colin. My name is Mr. Raymond but they take liberties.
“Makes sense. We haven’t had wolves around here in sixty years.”
The bell rings and we go back in for our day’s final duty, the last pre-exam class of English—Today’s Writing, my third of a course improvised when a newly hired teacher left town at Christmas never to return. Though I don’t prefer them, I’ve taught English classes in past years and even proposed that the school acquire a stock of translated classics, an idea vetoed because the principal, Milt Basso, had never heard of the writers and couldn’t pronounce most of their names. I once had dinner with a priest new to town who was openly astonished that I seemed to be a literate man, my very existence somehow lessening his sense of mission. A teacher is one thing, he probably thought, but penny-ante, two-bit stuff. His own tastes leaned towards the nineteenth century, Russian and French. We found ourselves playing match-the-name-to-the-title. I convinced him that Gogol had never written a story called “The Overshoe” but he became so disheartened that I confessed my troubles with Tolstoy’s longer novels. The fact is, I’ve been reading good books since I myself was in high school. There was a period of about six months one year when the American book club I belonged to consistently sent me the wrong items, from Kerouac to Billy Graham. I sent them back but read them first, all except one implausibly titled A Popular History of Northern Pelts, which got me thinking I was being used as a remainder bin and prompted me to write a nasty letter.
The class moves by almost without incident, except that Laura (The Pleader) McGreater glares at me for as long as she can without blinking or rolling her eyes. She still hasn’t forgiven me for awarding her a B on her last paper, something to do with “poetry” in country lyrics. When I pointed out certain weaknesses in her prose, namely a lack of actual sentences, she replied that no one else had ever thought they were weaknesses and her “real” English teachers had graded her higher. “They said there were many plus factors.” She and her brother Morris should be sold into slavery and made to sell grave-heisted flowers at bus terminals. With five minutes left, a few of the students break down and begin asking me what I know about the stories that the school board may be thinking of “cutting back” a teacher or two for next year. I tell them they probably know more about what’s in the works than I do, but not to worry because I certainly won’t. Another lie.
The bell rings. They’ve all filed out when one reappears in the doorway. It’s Laura. She says, “We liked having you,” and then turns and leaves before things get mushy or I can make a smartass remark. And so we are friends again, sort of, and I think differently of her and admit I might have misread her attention. Despite appearances, none of us inhabits an inevitable world. We are always taking stock, reassessing. We brace against shock waves others might not feel and could never predict. They don’t come sometimes, and sometimes they lay us out.
The bind is that while precautions must be taken they can never be relied upon. The lesson of scarecrows—they don’t work any more. One autumn my farming neighbours used cannons that every twenty minutes blasted a warning to hungry geese made wise by the effects of hunters’ rifles. (Crows were never much of a problem.) Before long the cannons didn’t work either, and eventually the crops were just given over to the birds, and they ingested so much chemical and died in such great numbers that the farmers’ problem was solved. Though there’s less for them to eat now, the birds are coming back because three successive years of drought have dried up the chemical money, and most of us are more aware than we once were, and the farmers have stopped spraying on sheer principle. I consider it a hopeful sign that we haven’t yet buggered up the magic of homing instincts.