Rendezvous

When Lee passes through a gate on the western edge of Hank’s home pasture, he sees right away that he was wrong the night before when he assumed Hank had moved his calves. Just inside the fence line there’s a slough with a puddle of water in the bottom and the calves standing in mud around it. Lee remembers the open gate and hopes the calves didn’t get out and cause Hank a bunch of trouble. He should have closed it.

He rides the half-mile through the pasture, the horse in no hurry now, thinking about Shiloh and how he slid to the ground and headed up the road toward town, and then he turned around and shouted back to Lee, “I might take you up on that offer of work, as long as my dad doesn’t need me.” Funny kid.

Up ahead, Lee can see the buffalo rubbing stone. There appear to be two people at the stone, one of them sitting on it. He wonders if the high school kids are in the pasture again. He asks the horse to jog one last time, and as he approaches he sees that the person standing is George Varga, wearing a new straw cowboy hat. And sitting on the rock is Karla Norman, the hairdresser, Dale Patterson’s fiancée or ex-fiancée, hard to know which, depends on the day of the week. Lee can see one of TNT’s famous cars—the black Trans Am, catching the sun like a show car—parked on the approach next to George’s truck. George has a thermos and appears to be drinking coffee from the metal top. Karla, more interestingly, has a six-pack of beer beside her on the rock. Once the six-pack registers, it’s like a magnet.

Old George grins like mad as Lee rides up and stops.

“You look like you could use a cold one,” Karla says. “Well, almost cold.” She pulls a bottle out of the box and twists off the cap.

“You have no idea how good that looks,” Lee says. The mosquitoes are swarming now that the heat of the day is over. Karla has a can of insect repellent on the rock, but it’s only the beer Lee cares about.

Karla moves to the edge of the stone and reaches to hand him the bottle. “Cheers,” she says.

Lee tips back the bottle and swallows, feels the moisture on his dry throat. Never has a beer tasted so good, even if it isn’t cold.

He wonders what Karla and George are doing here together —an odd pair—and then he realizes they aren’t together. George came to see if Lee would show up at the stone like Ivan Dodge did. Karla, apparently, is here to drink beer with the mosquitoes. Lee notices that the rock looks festive in the daylight, with the coloured handprints on it.

“So,” Karla says to Lee, “what have you been up to?” The horse stretches his nose toward her and she runs her hand down his face. He doesn’t object.

“Just out for a ride,” Lee says.

He thinks, I came across the road on this grey horse— what? Sixteen, seventeen hours ago?—and just kept on going. He can’t say that.

George slaps his thigh. “Just out for a ride, that’s a good one. Some ride.”

Karla looks puzzled but she doesn’t ask any more questions.

Lee drains the beer and hands the empty bottle back to her. Then he takes off George’s old hat and holds it out to him. “Thanks for the loan,” he says. “Saved the day.”

George waves it away. “You keep it,” he says. “I’ve got this new one.”

Lee puts the hat back on and thinks he can feel sand embedded in his brow. “Best get on home, then,” he says.

“Not so fast,” says George. He pulls something out of his shirt pocket and Lee sees that it’s a disposable camera, still in the foil packaging. George gets it unwrapped and then steps around so that he’s not looking into the sun, and snaps a couple of photos of Lee on the horse.

“You should get yourself one of those digital cameras, George,” Karla says. “You know, like a little computer.”

“Computers,” he says dismissively. “Don’t know nothing about them.” Then he takes a crisp new fifty-dollar bill out of his wallet and hands it up to Lee.

“I can’t take that,” Lee says.

“Why not. You earned it. Should probably be a couple of thousand by now, with inflation, but I’m not that generous.”

“No,” says Lee. “I can’t.”

“Take it,” says George, and Lee finally does, not having the energy to argue.

“Well, I’m curious, that’s for sure,” Karla says, popping the cap off another beer, “but none of my business.”

“Come on,” George says to Lee, putting the camera back in his pocket. “I’ll get the gate.” He tips his hat to Karla and says, “Happy birthday there, Karla. Don’t you drink too much and fall off that rock.”

“It’s your birthday?” Lee asks Karla.

“Yeah, but it’s not like anyone noticed. I’ve been stood up, apparently. I should probably be thanking my stars for that.”

He sees now that she’s too dressed up for sitting out in a pasture. She’s wearing a lacy white shirt and a red beaded necklace. He wonders if it’s Dale she was expecting, or someone else. Now that he’s actually looking at her, he realizes that she doesn’t seem especially happy.

“Well, happy birthday anyway,” he says. “Maybe someone decorated that rock just for you.” As soon as the words are out, he regrets them. They sound so lame.

But Karla knows what he means and looks down at the graffiti prints. “Thanks for the thought,” she says, “but no one I know would bother.” Then she says, “Oh crap. Now I’m feeling sorry for myself. Time to go home when that happens. Leave the gate open, will you. I’m going right after I finish this one.”

Lee guides the horse toward the gate and George walks along beside him. When they’re out of Karla’s hearing George shakes his head and says, “I don’t understand these modern women. Out here by herself drinking beer. Should be home raising babies.”

It makes Lee thinks of Lester. He would have said pretty much the same thing.

They reach the gate and George opens it and stretches it out on the ground. Before he gets in his truck he offers his hand for Lee to shake and says, “That’s quite the horse, there. Not built for dragging calves, but built for distance, sure as heck. Wait until I tell Anna. I’ll show her the picture, eh. Maybe put it in the book.”

After George is gone, Lee slips to the ground so he can walk the last quarter-mile home and limber himself up. He can see the dust of a vehicle coming from the south, so he waits for it to pass, shaking out his legs and taking a few steps on the spot. As the truck approaches, he recognizes it as Dale Patterson’s.

It doesn’t pass. It slows and pulls onto the approach behind TNT’s Trans Am, and Dale gets out. He’s got his arm in a sling.

“Torgeson,” Dale says, but he’s got no time to talk as he steps over the wire gate on his way to the buffalo stone. “Can’t keep the little woman waiting.”

So it’s on again, Lee thinks. The mystery man is Dale. Too bad for Karla.

Dale suddenly stops and turns back to Lee and says, “That horse.”

“What about him?” Lee asks, thinking maybe Dale knows where the horse came from.

“If you wanted a horse,” Dale says, “you should have called me. I could have sold you a real one. What the hell good is an Arab horse in this country?”

He doesn’t wait for Lee to respond and strides away through the pasture, cradling his bad arm with his good.

In fact, Lee has no response, other than he’s not going to complain about an animal that just carried him for a hundred miles. As he leads the horse home, he thinks about Karla in her lacy shirt waiting for Dale, and about her crazy family, the Normans, all the stories, old TNT, and Karla’s cousin who stabbed his mother. He wonders what someone like Karla thinks about him, the boy who was found in a laundry basket. Maybe nothing. But on the other hand, maybe she looks at him and sums up his life, as he did hers, by what she knows from talk. Not much chance that anyone will forget how he came to have the last name Torgeson.

He stops and loops the reins over the saddle horn and then walks the rest of the way home, letting the tired horse follow on his own. Everybody knows everything in Juliet, Lee thinks.

The Stars of Heaven

When Norval is stricken with chest pains, Lila is hell-bent on calling for the ambulance in Swift Current, but the pain subsides and Norval says he will go to the hospital only if Lila drives him. In fact, he says, why don’t they just try to get Dr. van Riebeeck on the phone, but Lila says he isn’t even certified in Canada yet, and anyway he’ll send Norval to Swift Current, so why waste precious time? Since it’s the only way Norval will agree to go, she loads him into the car. So as not to worry Rachelle, who’s in her room brooding over her breakup with Kyle, Lila calls upstairs and says she and Norval are going for a drive.

“Fine by me,” Rachelle’s voice snaps back. “I’m going out anyway. And don’t expect me home. I’m staying at Kristen’s.”

Not brooding, then.

On the way into town, Norval reports that the pain is gone. He doesn’t tell Lila about the tightness, the feeling that an elastic band is wrapped around his chest.

“Probably angina,” Lila says. “They’ll do an ECG. And a stress test.”

He doesn’t want a battery of tests. He suggests they turn around and go home. He’ll make an appointment for a physical, he promises, but Lila won’t hear of returning home.

“There’s no need for anyone to die of a heart attack these days, Norval,” Lila says. “So we’re going to get this checked and make sure. Otherwise, I won’t sleep. The surgeries for valve repair and blocked arteries and the like are very sophisticated now.”

Surgery? He certainly doesn’t want to be told he’s going under the knife. He wonders when Lila became such an expert on the treatment of heart disease and he’s tempted to say something sarcastic, but he doesn’t because he knows she’s concerned. He notices that she is driving fast.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he says. “You’d better slow down or you’ll have us stopped by the RCMP, and that won’t get us there any faster, will it.” He rolls the window down and feels the breeze on his face. The sky, which had been the blue of early evening when they left Juliet, is now quite dark—dark enough that he can see the stars, millions of them.

“Look at that,” he says to Lila. “Such a clear night sky. No moon. The Milky Way in full force.”

“What are you talking about, Norval?” Lila asks. “It’s only eight o’clock. Of course there’s no moon. It’s still light.”

Eight o’clock. Lila must be wrong. Still, when Norval looks ahead he can clearly see the oncoming semi with its shiny red cab, the gold colour of ripe crops on either side of the highway, the turquoise farmhouse that Lila always says reflects someone’s idea of unique when it’s really just a very bad decorating choice. So odd—the earth still bright with the colours of the day, and the night sky above, sprinkled with stars.

“The very lights of heaven,” he says. It’s a joke, he doesn’t believe in heaven, and he’s just thinking that he should explain himself to Lila, lest she misunderstand, when the stars disappear and Swift Current lies spread out before them, a small city tucked into a creek valley, and Lila is off the highway and onto the service road, still driving over the speed limit and following the green h signs that indicate a hospital.

And they’re almost there, just a short distance from the brand-new facility on the edge of town, when Lila hears Norval say, “Tell Blaine Dolson it’s not his fault,” and she looks at Norval and in the evening light she can see that the pain is upon him again, the most agonizing, wrenching pain this time, and she steps on the gas and drives as fast as she can without losing control of the car, up to the Emergency entrance, leaning on the horn and saying, “Norval, stay with me, we’re almost there.” There’s no one at the door, no one coming, and Lila pounds on the car horn until finally a nurse comes running, and another, and then it’s all out of Lila’s hands. Things are happening in slow motion—Lila has time to notice that one of the young nurses has pink streaks in her hair—and warp speed at the same time. They get Norval on a gurney and whisk him inside and down a hall, through a door into Emergency, a pair of nurses calling out for a doctor and the tools of their trade, wheeling Norval away, just like they do on the Life Channel, too busy to pay any attention to Lila. Maybe she should follow, she thinks, but it’s too frightening. She holds back and then when she thinks, I should be with him, it’s too late. The door that they’ve wheeled him through is locked. She looks around and sees no one. Why is this hospital so deserted? she wonders. Where are the nurses? Busy. Busy with Norval. So she waits. There are several armchairs in the waiting area and she sits in one of them, and it feels too soft, too obviously chosen for a person needing comfort. She stares at the television on the wall, one program turning into another, a sitcom, a nature show, nothing at all making sense, until a young Hutterite couple in their black clothing come through doors leading from ICU and sit across from her. The woman is crying and Lila can’t stand it, she can’t sit here and watch a woman cry a few feet away from her. She has to leave, do something. Move her car, that’s what she can do.

She goes outside and gets in the car, which is still nosed right up to the Emergency entrance and in the way of hospital traffic, forcing anyone who comes along to go around it. There’s a blinding bright fluorescent light over the entrance doors even though it’s not yet dark, and it shines down on Lila as she sits, paralyzed, until a big truck carrying more Hutterites comes along and she finally starts her car and moves it so they can get by. As she parks properly in the visitors’ lot, she thinks, This is ridiculous, they’ll be looking for me, Norval will want me. She gets out of the car, locks it and walks back to the Emergency door.

A nurse is there looking for her, and she takes her to the doctor, who explains what has happened. “Is there someone you can call?” the nurse, an older woman, asks as Lila sits, unbelieving, with Norval’s body—his body!—in the treatment room where he’d died, hardly more than a cubicle. And Lila thinks about saying my daughter but she shakes her head, no, there’s no one to call. The nurse wants information from her, the spelling of Norval’s name, his health card number, date of birth, what funeral home she would like them to call. How can she ask that? Lila thinks. But she has to, of course she does. The nurse is kindly. She tells Lila to take all the time she needs with Norval, and she even brings her a cup of tea, which goes cold on the stand beside the bed while Lila wonders, How will I tell Rachelle?

Eventually, the nurse suggests that Lila go home and get some rest. She offers to drive her when she gets off in half an hour—“I live out your way,” she says. “Juliet, isn’t it?”—but Lila says no. She turns down an over-the-counter sleeping pill too.

She doesn’t want to go home. It will be true once she gets home, everything will change as soon as she drives the car into the driveway and has to face the house and the fact of Norval’s absence. When she does finally leave the hospital, she goes to the drugstore and buys some makeup and a bottle of bath salts. Her mind is numb as her hands select cosmetics off the store shelves. She almost buys a bridal magazine for Rachelle before she remembers that the wedding is off. After the drugstore, she stops at a gas station and buys a quick-pick lottery ticket and fills the car up, and watches the young attendant wash the dust off the windows.

Now she has to go home. There is no place else to go. There is no more avoiding the truth of what has happened— no avoiding Juliet and her house and Rachelle and the kitchen table with Norval’s dinner plate still on it—and she gets back in the car and drives toward the service road and the highway going west. All the way home, she thinks of Norval’s last words and what he said before the pain took his ability to talk: Tell Blaine Dolson it’s not his fault. He hadn’t said, Tell Rachelle I love her. He hadn’t said, You’re everything in the world to me, Lila. He’d had no dying words for his wife and daughter, just a few words for a feckless client with too many kids.

But Norval hadn’t known he was dying, Lila reasons. He’d just thought of something, some little detail having to do with Blaine Dolson’s accounts, and out it had popped. It had been an abbreviated sentence, the full intent being something like, They’ll probably keep me in the hospital overnight and you’ll have to take a few calls for me. If Blaine Dolson calls, tell him it’s not his fault. There was an incorrect payment date printed on one of his bank statements. Just assure him it’s our error and not his, and we’ll straighten it out next week.

But Norval had also said something about the lights of heaven. Lila can’t remember what, she hadn’t paid attention because Norval was always saying things like that, things that were too smart for her, or at least that’s how they made her feel, but the reference to heaven—did that not mean he was thinking about dying? And if he was thinking about dying, shouldn’t he also have been thinking about her and Rachelle, and not Blaine Dolson? It was selfish of Norval to waste his dying thoughts on a bank client, she thinks, and just as she pulls into Juliet she remembers what else he’d said that evening, about almost getting shot, and how he’d refused to explain himself and sat watching the Weather Channel, as though he knew. Oh my God, Lila thinks, he’d been having these chest pains all day and he hadn’t said anything, and that’s what he meant by “almost shot.” She’s furious, absolutely furious with him for not getting medical attention straight away, look what he’s done by being careless, just look at how he’s left her alone, how could he, and the word alone repeats in her head until she gets the car stopped in the driveway, and she pounds on the steering wheel in anger, furious with Norval for being so irresponsible, furious with Rachelle for getting pregnant and causing Norval so much stress, furious with the bank for sending Norval to Juliet in the first place and making him work too hard. And finally sobbing because she’s lost him, the other half of herself, lost him for good.

When Lila eventually gets out of the car, the first thing she notices is that the grass is too long. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? It was unlike Norval to let the grass grow. He’s very fussy about the length of his lawn. She’s even seen him measure it, as though it were a green on a golf course. She walks around the side of the house to the back and the grass in the backyard is overgrown as well. Then she notices the new lawn mower, and remembers that the old one was not working, and that Norval had been going on and on about needing a new mower.

She enters the house through the back door and the kitchen, and falters when she sees Norval’s plate and the pair of chopsticks on the table. She stands in the kitchen, not sure that she can face the rest of the house, not sure that she can get through this. Perhaps if Rachelle were here they could get through it together. She should try to reach her, try her cell, or Kristen’s, ask her to come home without saying why. But Rachelle will argue, demand to know, and Lila will break down, and she can’t tell Rachelle over the phone. Your father died tonight. Not over the phone.

In the living room she stares at the couch, not believing that just hours ago Norval was lying there watching the Weather Channel. She can still see the outline of his body in the nap of the Ultrasuede fabric. Norval’s couch. She’d always thought of it as his because he’d driven all the way to Regina in a borrowed truck to pick it up, and then when he got it home, she discovered that the company had ordered the wrong couch, only she’d never told Norval because he seemed so happy with this one. It was the most interest he’d ever shown in a piece of furniture and he complimented her several times on her choice. Because she was pretty sure it was an even more expensive couch than the one she’d ordered, she kept the company’s mistake to herself, even when she noticed that the fabric had a tendency to hold the outlines of people’s buttocks—a definite flaw, she’d thought, considering how much money she’d spent. She puts her hand down on Norval’s couch and imagines his warmth. She wants to lie down on the couch and let herself sink into the outline of Norval’s body, feel the warmth that she will never—is it possible?—feel again. But the couch is a shrine that she can’t yet disturb.

Instead, she goes looking. For clues. Clues that Norval knew something was wrong—You know, Lila, I was almost shot today—a note perhaps, like a suicide note, a message for her or for Rachelle, a goodbye, last words like the ones people on doomed aircraft write on the backs of blank cheques or the insides of cigarette boxes, and which are found floating amid the debris in the North Sea or the Indian Ocean.

She begins with his sports jacket, which is hanging over the back of a chair in the kitchen. She finds a miniature appointment book—no PalmPilot, even though she’d wanted to buy him one; a cell phone was enough portable technology, he’d said. In another pocket, his keys. And a list—her own list—of items that he was to discuss with Joe. How could it be that just hours ago Norval was at the church talking about something as ordinary as paint? She hangs the jacket back on the chair.

She moves from the kitchen to Norval’s den, where he has a desk, an armchair and a set of bookshelves. The desk is so neat you’d swear he hadn’t done any work at it in years, and perhaps he hadn’t. When Lila thinks about it, she has no idea what Norval did in here. He has a small TV on one of the bookshelves. Maybe he just came in here and watched the Weather Channel while Lila and Rachelle were watching reality shows in the living room. She scans the books on the shelves: several on history and geography, a couple of decades-old university commerce texts, the poetry and devotional books Norval used for his lay services, a set of reference books of famous quotations, and a National Geographic atlas that had been a Christmas present from her, at Norval’s request.

She remembers that when they first got notice they were moving to Juliet, Norval had special-ordered a number of Prairie history books from a bookstore in the city because he wanted to understand the place they were moving to. She’d tried to read one of them herself and hadn’t got past the introduction. But Norval had devoured them all, read passages aloud to her that he found particularly interesting. He told her that apparently they were moving to a desert—a desert, Lila, and I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was a desert in Canada. Well, it wasn’t much of a desert, but the first year they’d lived here Norval had taken her and baby Rachelle out into the dunes with a photographer for their yearly Christmas card picture. She’d objected, had wanted to use a studio photo, but Norval’s heart was set on the dunes picture, so she relented. She wishes she had a copy of that photograph to look at right now, but she’s not sure one even exists any more.

She checks the desk drawers. Nothing. They’re empty except for a phone book, a pad of paper and a handful of pens, some of them with the bank’s name printed in gold letters on the shaft. She holds the pad of paper up to the light to see if anything Norval had written was indented on the top page, but the pad looks brand new. The wastebasket contains just two spent scratch lotto tickets and a cellophane candy wrapper. The den is a perfect reflection of Norval, a perfect reflection of a man who kept everything to himself. She leaves the room, closing the door quietly as though she doesn’t want to disturb a man at work.

Lila checks every surface in the house that might hold a last note from Norval—the dining room table, the telephone stand, the vanity counter in the bathroom—but she finds nothing. Norval’s bedside table holds only his cell phone, a news magazine, his reading glasses and the clock radio. She gives up. On her way back downstairs, she opens Rachelle’s bedroom door and is shocked to see her there, sound asleep on top of the covers, still dressed.

Now is the time. She must wake her and tell her. She says Rachelle’s name, but when she gets no response, she quietly closes the door. I’m a coward, she thinks. Without Norval, I’m not equipped for life.

In the living room, she collapses into an armchair and looks once again at Norval’s shape in the Ultrasuede, and once again she cries, but this time not in anger. She sits with a Kleenex box on her lap and a wastebasket at her feet, dreading the conversation with her daughter, dreading all that she will have to do in the next few days, all the arrangements. Tomorrow, she thinks, she will become a widow in the eyes of the world.

And there will be a funeral to plan, instead of a wedding.

Astrid’s Secret

As Lee finally walks into his own yard, he studies the car parked by the house. He doesn’t recognize it. Cracker comes to greet him, his tail wagging, looking back toward the house as though he’s saying, Look, another stranger—the first one being the horse, all those hours ago. Now, he doesn’t pay the horse any mind at all.

“Who’s here, Cracker?” Lee says, reaching down to give the dog a pat.

As they approach the house, he sees Mrs. Bulin from the post office sitting on the step. He remembers her phone message, the one he’d ignored: Give me a call, Lee. There’s something I need to discuss with you. Mrs. Bulin stands and stretches, giving the impression that she’s been waiting awhile. She’s wearing purple knee-length shorts and her thin legs are blue-white, as though they haven’t seen a minute of sun all summer.

She says, “That’s a long time to sit for an old girl like me. I was about to leave but I could tell from the dog that it was you coming up the road. Did you get my message?”

Lee decides ignorance is the way to plead. “Sorry,” he says, “I haven’t checked messages all day.” It’s not exactly a lie. He wonders what could be so important that it brought her out here. Surely not just an overdue bill for his mailbox. That would be beyond the call of postal duty, even for Mrs. Bulin.

“I wanted to talk to you,” she says. “In private, I mean. Not in the post office.”

Lee is tired and sore, and he can’t think of anyone he’d rather not talk to more than Mrs. Bulin right now. He’d like to put the horse in a pen, thank him for the day’s long ride with a cool bath and a good brush, then sit alone in one of Astrid’s webbed plastic lawn chairs and drink another beer or two—cold this time—and watch the sunset. He would like to be rude and send Mrs. Bulin packing, but he doesn’t because you have to be careful what you say to someone who daily sees and talks to the whole town. Anyway, Astrid didn’t approve of rudeness and sent no one packing without a good reason. He hears her voice: Use people well.

“You’d better come in, then,” Lee says. “Just let me put this horse away. Wait in the house if you want. The door’s open.”

“I might do,” Mrs. Bulin says. “That step was getting a little hard on the behind.”

Not something he wants to think about, Mrs. Bulin’s behind, and neither does he want to think about her in his house, collecting information, sniffing for mould in the fridge, running her finger over surfaces to check for dust. He’ll have to hose the sweaty horse down later, he thinks, after Mrs. Bulin is gone, which won’t be long if he can help it. He leads the horse into the pen, and the horse pulls toward the water bucket. Lee removes the saddle and bridle and turns him loose. The horse takes a long drink and then goes looking for a good spot to roll. He snorts and paws at the dust in a few different spots, then drops to the ground and stretches and rolls the full length of one side of his body, flips himself over and does the same on the other side. He stands and shakes, dirt now coated to his hide. Even his head is covered in black dirt. He looks like a chimney sweep, Lee thinks, tossing a substantial forkload of hay over the top rail. Then he takes the saddle and bridle and drops them just inside the barn door, saving the cleaning for later. The pad is wet with sweat and he hangs it over a stall divider to dry.

When Lee gets back to the house he finds Mrs. Bulin sitting on a kitchen chair. She’s staring at the stack of mail on the sideboard, her stock-in-trade. She’s distracted, uncomfortable. She fidgets in her chair. She doesn’t look as though she’s been snooping around, which surprises Lee. He thought for sure he’d find her with her nose in a cup-board. He takes old George’s hat off and lays it on the counter.

“I’ll make tea,” Lee says. “Unless you’d like something else.” Although he doesn’t have much else. He’s saving the beer in the fridge for himself.

“Tea would be fine,” she says. “Lovely.”

As Lee puts the kettle on, she says, “That’s quite a sunburn you’ve got. You should use sunscreen. Robert Redford looks like an old leather boot now. He used to be so good-looking.”

Lee can feel the sunburn on his face and the back of his neck, he doesn’t need Mrs. Bulin to point it out. He gets a couple of clean mugs out of the cupboard and puts them on the table.

“That cowboy movie,” Mrs. Bulin says. “I saw it at the drive-in, a long time ago. I guess he’s still good-looking for his age, when you think about it.”

Lee has no idea what movie she’s talking about. She looks down at her hands and grows silent—Mrs. Bulin, silent— and Lee wonders with a touch of alarm, What could it be, the reason she drove out here?

Then she says, “It’s about Astrid. You know I see things, don’t you. At the post office.”

Lee nods.

“I see people every day, I see what comes in the mail. I get blamed for spreading rumours, Lee, but I can keep secrets. I’m actually very good at keeping secrets.” She stops.

Lee doesn’t prompt. He’s standing by the stove, waiting for the kettle to boil.

“This has been bothering me,” she says, and takes a deep breath. “I believe Astrid thought of me as a friend. We shared a secret, just the two of us, although we never spoke about it, not once.”

And then Lee knows. He knows that whatever Mrs. Bulin has to say, it will be about his mother. Not Astrid, but his real mother. He places one hand on the porcelain stovetop, but it’s hot from the burner and so he removes it again. Sticks it casually in his back pocket.

“Go on,” he says.

“Near the end, I visited Astrid in the hospital, and she kept talking about work she had to do. Baking. Ironing. Laundry piled on the clothes dryer. I kept saying to her, ‘It’s fine, Astrid. You don’t need to worry about that. It’s all taken care of.’” Mrs. Bulin looks at Lee. “Is it all right, me telling you this?”

Lee nods. He doesn’t know if it’s all right or not. His mind is all over the place with questions about what Mrs. Bulin might know. Mrs. Bulin, of all people.

“Even though Astrid was in a fog,” Mrs. Bulin continues, “she knew she wasn’t going home again, and so she asked me if I would come here, to the farm, and at first I thought she wanted me to come and do chores. By this time, with the drugs and such, I didn’t think it mattered who she was talking to—me, a nurse, a neighbour—but then I realized she wasn’t talking about chores, and she knew it was me by her bed. There was something she wanted done, and it had to be me.” She looks at Lee, who is now watching her carefully, waiting, his heart skipping beats, or maybe it only seems to be. “She asked me to come out here and find a box in her closet. An old candy box.”

A candy box. Lee thinks about the closet, the one in Astrid’s bedroom, the same closet that holds the blue velvet watch box. He can see the candy box, knows exactly where it is.

“I was supposed to find it and burn it,” Mrs. Bulin says, “and she was so insistent and upset that finally I told her I had already done as she asked. I said I’d found the box and burned it, and she relaxed then. Settled right down. Only I was lying, of course.”

She looks at Lee. “So that’s it. And now it’s been bothering me, the same way it bothered her. That I didn’t do it when I said I did. I thought about coming out here when you weren’t home and finding it, but I couldn’t do that. So then I decided to just tell you. And when I got here tonight and you weren’t home I thought again about what she’d asked me to do and how I could still make good on my promise, but that just didn’t seem right. I suppose I decided the candy box was something you should know about.”

The kettle is boiling. Lee looks for the teapot but it’s not on the counter where Astrid used to keep it. He doesn’t usually make a pot of tea for himself, just puts a tea bag in a mug. His eye lands once again on the silver tea service and he hears Astrid’s voice, For company, use the silver tea service, and so he does. He takes the pot out of the oak cabinet and rinses it out at the sink, and then drops a tea bag in. Even though the pot is tarnished. He carries it to the table and places it in the middle.

“Do you have any idea what’s in this box?” Mrs. Bulin asks.

“No,” Lee says. He imagines things: photographs, adoption papers, mailing addresses and telephone numbers. “Do you?”

“I believe I do,” she says. “But I’ll leave this with you now. I’ve done what I thought I should. I hope I did the right thing.” She stands up from her chair. “Thanks for the offer of tea but I think you’ll need time to yourself.”

Lee doesn’t know what to say. He feels neither gratitude nor animosity toward Mrs. Bulin, just that she has been a messenger, delivering an old package that he suspected was out there somewhere in the world but would never arrive in his hands.

She stands but seems not quite ready to go. She says, again, “It still bothers me that I told Astrid a lie, but I was trying to make things easy for her. ‘Don’t you fuss, Astrid,’ I said. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. I baked bread and I did the ironing. I cooked Lee a big pot of stew and I put that box you’re worried about in the burning barrel and lit a match to it. So everything’s been taken care of.’ That’s what I said to her.”

She’s still looking at him, waiting. Lee thinks he’s no better at this than Lester was. Talking. Alleviating guilt, his own or anyone else’s. He says, “You can make me that stew anytime you want.”

Mrs. Bulin says, “You don’t know what you’re asking. I can’t make a good stew for love nor money.” It’s left hanging, whether or not that part of the lie will be annulled.

After Mrs. Bulin leaves, Lee pushes his chair from the table and climbs the stairs to Astrid and Lester’s bedroom. As he stands in front of the closet door, he thinks of the candy box as a gift that you get to open at a designated time. He doesn’t know if this is the time or not. He feels a strange sense of euphoria, like he did out in the sand, in the hot sun. Whatever is in the box, he decides, he has to know, and he opens the closet door.

And there it is, where he knew it would be, under a neat little pile of pillowcases, the special ones with the crocheted edges. The box is an ordinary old chocolate box, the kind Astrid used to save for storing odds and ends before she discovered snap-top plastic containers. It cries out with secrecy, the way it’s placed underneath the linens. Why had he not realized before? Lee’s heart begins to beat faster again as he lifts the pillowcases, sets them aside and then reaches for the box.

It contains a half-dozen or so postcards wrapped in an elastic band. Lee removes the postcards and then sets the box back on the shelf. The ancient elastic band crumbles and the cards, seven of them, fall open in his hands. He sees that they all have the same photo on the front—an old three-storey building with some kind of ivy clinging to the red bricks, a sign over the doorway reading kelsey hotel. When he examines the printed caption on the back, he learns that the hotel is in Winnipeg. The postmarks are over twenty years old, dating from the time of his childhood. Lee knows without reading a word that the messages, neatly written and never signed, are from his mother.

He carries the cards to Astrid and Lester’s bed, his heart beating wildly now, and sits down and tries to read the messages even though his vision is blurred. He tries to stay cool. None of this really matters now, he tells himself, he’s simply curious. He can’t focus, but he keeps trying, and gradually he’s able to read and translate the writing into words. The first card contains eight lines of the children’s verse “Pease Porridge Hot,” which he knows by heart. He goes through the cards and sees they each contain a verse. “Ladybird, Ladybird,” he knows that one too. “The Lion and the Unicorn.” “Ride a Cock Horse.” “Old King Cole.” “The Owl and the Pussycat.” And, finally, “The North Wind Doth Blow.” Six or eight lines of verse, no signature. He recognizes them all, every verse, from Astrid’s bedtime recitations. He shuffles the cards and reads them again, savouring the familiar words.

Lee looks at his hands and can’t believe how they’re shaking. He becomes conscious of his breathing, too conscious, and it seems that he’s getting it wrong as he tries to breathe properly, too shallow, too deep. How, he wonders, can you get breathing wrong, something that you’ve done without thinking all your life? He feels dizzy and lies back on the bed. The cards are on his chest, too heavy, much heavier than seven postcards should be, and he swipes them off, sends them flying to the floor. He tells himself to breathe, the same way he told Shiloh Dolson to breathe when he got bucked off the horse, he can hear his own voice, breathe, breathe, and he manages to get himself calmed down and the weight lifts off his chest and he’s able to sit up and think again. He pieces together the journey that took the postcards from his mother’s hand to Astrid’s closet, at the same time thinking, For a few minutes there I was almost dead. He wonders if that’s what Shiloh thought once he got his breath back.

Lee picks up the cards and this time he sorts them according to the dates on the postmarks and reads them carefully once more, in the order they arrived. It’s as though Astrid and his mother are in the room with him, Astrid’s voice, his mother’s hand. His mother had sent the cards hoping that Astrid would read them aloud and there would be some kind of connection among the three of them. And Astrid had complied. Although she hadn’t read the cards aloud or showed them to Lee, she’d recited the verses, all seven, over and over again at countless bedtimes, until Lee outgrew them and lost interest.

No sooner has Lee pieced this together than the anger comes, unbelievable anger, at a woman who wanted to disappear but not completely, who would take the time to write a postcard but not to actually show up. Anger on Astrid’s behalf, because these cards arriving in the mail must have frightened her, tormented her with the possibility that Lee’s mother would show up and perhaps take Lee away. And then anger at Astrid for keeping the cards a secret, and anger at himself for being angry with a woman who had loved him like her own. Thoughts of the post office and Mrs. Bulin, the worry that she must have caused Astrid—who almost always got the mail, rarely Lester—because anyone will read the back of a postcard, and especially Mrs. Bulin, who took the term public mail literally. What looks had been exchanged between Astrid and Mrs. Bulin over the postcards, and had Mrs. Bulin really kept the secret the way she’d claimed? She’d lied to Astrid on her deathbed. How could she be trusted? Instantly, Lee is sure that everyone knew about the cards, everyone but him, and he tosses them to the floor again like a child having a tantrum.

Immediately sorry. The cards are precious. He picks them up carefully, one by one, thinking, Winnipeg. So his mother wasn’t in California, or Norway. Winnipeg is not very far away at all, she might still be there, people live in the same place for twenty years, lots of people, most people. He could go there. He could find this Kelsey Hotel. Someone, an old front-desk clerk perhaps, might remember her, might remember a woman writing nursery rhymes on postcards and dropping them in the hotel mail. Or maybe she is the front-desk clerk, maybe she was an employee at the hotel and still is, that’s possible too.

But why? Why would he want to go there and try to find her, for what purpose? A woman who abandoned him in the same way that Cracker’s previous owner left him on the side of the road and drove away heartlessly, or perhaps not heartlessly, but drove away all the same. What good can possibly come of knowing? Lee asks himself as he turns the postcards over in his hands, looking at the picture of the hotel, examining the neat handwriting, the blue ink, the missing signatures.

As Lee sits on the edge of Astrid and Lester’s bed flipping through the cards again and again, he thinks about Astrid sitting in this same room, thinking the same tangled thoughts and feeling the same confusion as the postcards arrived, one after another, with no clue as to the sender’s intentions. She must have agonized about what to tell Lee, whether to tell him at all. Perhaps she hadn’t told even Lester and had wondered, as Lee just did, What good can possibly come of knowing? And when the cards stopped coming she’d put them in the candy box and hidden them in the closet, and left the decision about what to do with them until later. And then she’d forgotten about them until she was on her deathbed and she remembered the cards in a fog of thinking about chores and responsibilities, and that’s when she’d asked Mrs. Bulin to take care of the box so that Lee wouldn’t find it and blame her for keeping the secret.

Which he would never do, blame Astrid for anything, the way she had cared for him so unconditionally, loving mother, just as her headstone described her.

He puts the postcards back in the box, and then returns them to their place in the closet, under the pillowcases. He thinks of Astrid again, thinks about the trouble she must have felt as she added each new postcard to the others and wrapped them all up with an elastic band. Her fear that Lee’s mother—whoever she was—would someday take back the child she’d left in the porch, the one Astrid had mistaken for a tomcat. How his life could have been different.

He can’t imagine any other life. He doesn’t want to. He wants only to be Lee Torgeson. He wants only to be here. Before he closes the closet door he runs his hand over the blue velvet box on the shelf above. The watch box. Together, the two boxes remind Lee of secrets, one he kept, and one that was kept from him. They seem, in a way that makes no real sense, to cancel each other out. He picks up the watch box, opens it and stares at the satiny lining. It was the worst thing he’d ever done in childhood, breaking the watch and throwing it in the sand and then lying about it. He takes the old watch he found on the trail out of his pocket and puts it in the box. Then he closes the lid and returns it to the closet shelf.

He goes back downstairs, hesitates briefly, and then calls Directory Assistance. Even though he knows it’s too late and nothing will come of it. His heart beats normally. The operator tells him there’s no listing for the Kelsey Hotel but there’s a listing for the Kelsey Care Centre with the same address as the one on the postcards. Lee calls, and the person who answers tells him that the care centre is, in fact, on the site of the old hotel. The hotel itself was torn down fifteen years earlier.

So that’s it, Lee thinks. The trail ends.

Lee is suddenly so tired that all he can think about is his bed. The horse will have to wait until tomorrow for his bath. He goes outside to fill Cracker’s dish with kibble, and when he steps back into the porch his eye lands on the spot where Astrid found the laundry basket all those years ago, and he stares at it, but only for a second or two.

He doesn’t bother with a bath for himself either, he’s too tired, but when he goes to bed his mind won’t stop working. It’s still not completely dark outside, and even with the curtains drawn there’s too much light in the room. When he closes his eyes he sees miles and miles of yellow sand passing beneath him, and old postcards scattering like a deck of cards. The dog barks and the sound seems to be coming from under his bed. Lee hears the cattle, the coyotes, every sound intensified, right in the room with him. His body aches and his saddle sores burn. He can’t get comfortable.

For the second night in a row, he gives up on sleep and goes downstairs to the kitchen, and is faced once again with Astrid’s tarnished teapot. The word samovar pops into his head, the image of a teapot in the sand, and the caption The Persian samovar, whether simple or elaborate, is an essential item of hospitality and hot tea is enjoyed no matter how temporary a desert encampment might be. He resolves to clean Astrid’s tea service, take care of it, and in doing so, make it his. Surely he can figure out how to do this. He roots through the bottles of cleaning products in the cupboard under the sink, and he actually finds a jar that claims to be silver polish. He reads the instructions and goes to work.

Subtopia

“I broke my arm, Daddy,” Daisy says from the couch as Blaine and Shiloh come through the door.

Shiloh is in front, and then Blaine, carrying the rifle. It’s past the children’s bedtime, that of the youngest ones at least, but Vicki has let them stay up for her own sake, frantic as she was about her absent husband and son. The house smells of Pizza Pops.

“Where did you find him?” Vicki asks Blaine. “He’s been gone all day.”

“Walking home,” is all Blaine says.

Shiloh immediately goes downstairs to his room, and within minutes his CD player is blasting. Blaine leans the rifle against the wall and sits at the dining room table, the one that belonged to his mother, without saying anything more to Vicki, without acknowledging Daisy and her cast.

“Look, Daddy,” Daisy says.

He still doesn’t look. He takes the box of bullets out of his pocket and lays it on the table in front of him, and then he takes off his cap and lays that on the table too, and exhales a sigh that, to Vicki’s mind, goes on forever, as though he’s completely emptying his lungs of air. She’d been expecting anger, planning for it all day, ever since she loaded the kids in the car and went to town, but this is not anger, it’s something else altogether, something more frightening. She doesn’t like the way he’s leaned the gun against the wall, so casually. Blaine is always careful with the guns, so careful to keep them in the locked cabinet.

“What is it, Blaine?” she asks. She can hear the caution in her voice. She doesn’t like that either, caution in her own house. She’s been feeling it for days, ever since she picked the beans. The beans that are now missing. She’d thought maybe Blaine had come home from work early and done them himself, but when she checked the freezer they weren’t there. It was a ridiculous thought anyway. Blaine wouldn’t know how to process beans.

“Look, Daddy,” Daisy says again, this time getting off the couch and approaching Blaine, holding her arm with its white plaster casing out in front of her.

Blaine puts his index finger through the opening in the band of his cap and twirls it on the table. The peak spins around and around like a ceiling fan.

“Why won’t Daddy look at my cast?” Daisy asks her mother, and Vicki shushes her.

She can’t be sure what to do or say until she gets a better reading of Blaine and what is going through his mind. There’s something in the drone of Shiloh’s music that reminds her of the sound of a small plane spinning out of control toward the earth.

“Go sit on the couch for a minute,” Vicki says to Daisy. “Let Daddy rest. He just got home.”

“But I broke my arm,” Daisy whines.

“I know,” Vicki says. “We’ll tell Daddy all about it. Just give him a minute.”

Daisy returns to the couch, putting on her best pout. The other kids, all but Shiloh, have appeared from down the hall, having heard Blaine and Shiloh come in. Lucille, with her lopsided haircut, wraps herself around Vicki’s leg. Of all the kids, Vicki thinks, she is the most sensitive to adult moods, gets upset when adult voices are raised. The kids wait to see what will happen. They want to know what Blaine will think about Daisy’s broken arm, but they know better than to interrupt whatever is going on. They wait for Vicki’s lead.

Blaine finally acknowledges that Vicki is looking at him.

She takes a first stab. “I’m sorry about the day, honey,” she says. “Things started out so well, then one thing led to another.”

Blaine still doesn’t speak, just stares at her as though she’s a stranger in his house, and the silence is so unnerving that she looks away.

“Well,” she says, “I guess you two must be hungry.”

She goes to the kitchen, which is open to the dining room, and takes the remaining Pizza Pops out of the freezer and finds a clean baking sheet. She keeps her eye on the situation and every once in a while she shoots the kids a look that says, Wait. Be good. Just wait. She puts the Pizza Pops in the oven and then she carefully breaks up the boxes they came in and sets them aside for recycling. She feels Blaine watching her. Shiloh shuts his droning music off, and then Vicki hears his footsteps coming up the stairs.

Finally, when she can stand Blaine’s silence no longer, she asks, “What’s wrong, Blaine? You’d better tell me.” Even if the answer would best be spoken behind closed doors, without all the kids listening, she has to ask.

Blaine stops spinning his cap and says, “How did you pay for those Pizza Pops?”

Vicki opens the cutlery drawer and retrieves knives and forks for Blaine and Shiloh. “I wrote a cheque,” she says, her back to him. She can smell the Pizza Pops now, their tomato sauce unlike anything she can create herself on the stove. She expects the anger will come soon, about the cheque, Daisy’s arm, the Pizza Pops smell. And the beans, of course, although she has no idea what she’ll say about that because she doesn’t know where they are.

She tenses, gets ready, and then Blaine says, “This is not my fault, Vicki. I hope you know this is not my fault.”

She turns around and the look on his face scares her half to death. There’s not a trace of anger, just a terrible, terrible sadness. She remembers the long sigh when he first sat down at the table, like a dying man’s last breath.

Shiloh appears on the landing from the basement.

“Where were you all day anyway?” Vicki asks Shiloh, fear creeping into her voice, disguising itself as annoyance.

“While you were looking for some stupid kitchen pot, I was looking for something else. What’s wrong with that?”

“Just leave him be,” says Blaine to Vicki.

“Buck’s dead,” Shiloh says to Vicki. “Did you know that?”

“What do you mean?” Vicki asks. “Bucko’s out in the pen.”

“No, he’s not,” Shiloh says. “He’s dead. He colicked and died.”

“Is this true, Blaine?” Vicki asks.

Shiloh says, “It’s because of you, you know.” He’s in the room now, moving closer to the kitchen and Vicki.

“Me? How is it because of me?” Vicki is remembering the horse and the way he looked in the morning, how he was standing in the pen staring at his flank and she thought it was the flies bothering him.

“If you’d stayed home like Dad told you, we would have noticed.”

“Never mind,” Blaine says to him. “What’s done is done.”

“That was Dad’s horse, the last one, the only damn horse left on the place.” He is standing right next to Blaine now, waiting for him to tell Vicki she’s useless. But he doesn’t. He’s too upset about the horse to talk, Shiloh thinks, and so he speaks for him, says what he knows Blaine wants to say. “It’s all your fault that we’re in this whole mess,” Shiloh says to Vicki, “because you’re so bloody useless.” He lifts his chin, triumphant, and looks at his father.

Blaine stands up, towers over Shiloh. Shiloh hears his mother say, “Don’t, Blaine. He doesn’t mean it.”

Don’t, Blaine? What’s she telling him not to do? Shiloh looks at his father’s face and is confused when he sees that Blaine is not even looking at Vicki; he’s looking at him. He grabs Shiloh by the shoulders as though he’s going to shake him, and Shiloh has no idea what is going on. He shrinks back, tries to turn and run, but Blaine’s grip is too solid, he can’t get loose.

“Don’t,” he hears his mother say again, more quietly this time.

“Daddy,” Lucille says with worry in her voice, and Vicki picks her up.

“Shush, baby,” Shiloh hears Vicki say. “It’s okay.”

And then he feels his father’s arms around him, and he struggles to get away, tries to push himself back, but he can’t, he has to stand there because Blaine is holding him so tight. One of Blaine’s big hands is on the back of Shiloh’s head now, pressing his face into his chest, and Shiloh doesn’t know what to do. He can see the kids and Vicki watching, their eyes wide. Vicki is smoothing Lucille’s hair, that stupid haircut, and he can see that she is picking at something, a little piece of gum that Karla Norman missed. Then Shiloh closes his eyes and stops struggling to get away, and he lets himself sink into his father’s chest and he’s afraid he’s going to cry, he won’t be able to stop himself, and he leaves his face in Blaine’s T-shirt so no one will notice if he cries. Leaves it there until the feeling goes away and he’s sure he won’t cry.

And then Blaine’s arms loosen their grip and Shiloh steps back, and Blaine says to him, “It’s not Vicki’s fault, Shiloh. It’s nobody’s fault. Things happen. Don’t ever call your mother useless again. I don’t want to hear that. Not ever.”

Then he feels ashamed, more ashamed now than he would have felt had his father yelled at him, smacked him even. His face burns with shame, but his father says, “Put that rifle away for me, will you. You know where the key is. Just make sure none of these kids sees where it’s hidden.” He remembers when Blaine showed him where the key was and said, You’re old enough to be responsible.

Shiloh picks up the rifle from where it’s leaning against the wall and asks, “The bullets too?”

Blaine nods and says, “You know where they go.”

After Shiloh has gone down the hall to where the gun cabinet is, Vicki says, “I don’t want to be too hard on him, but we have to say something about today. About him being gone all day.”

Blaine thinks for a minute, and then he says, “Mostly I think you baby these kids, Vicki. But forget about today. Let’s pretend today didn’t happen. Let’s pretend that it’s yesterday. I’ll eat the damned Pizza Pops and pretend they taste like food. How about that.”

Daisy gets off the couch and holds out her cast. “But I really did break my arm,” she says. “See?”

Blaine looks at the cast, then says, “Well, I guess you did. You’d better bring me a pen, then.”

Daisy finds a pen by the phone and takes it to him and holds up her cast, and he writes something. Daisy can’t read what it says, the writing is too messy.

“It says, ‘Today you’re the winner of the best kid contest,’” Blaine says. “Don’t you know about that contest?”

Daisy shakes her head.

“Well, it’s a contest, and today you won.”

When Shiloh comes back, Vicki says to him, “You’re off the hook. We’ve all got amnesia about the whole day.”

Shiloh isn’t sure what she means, but it’s good enough. He can smell the Pizza Pops and realizes he’s starving. Although this is something Vicki will not allow the kids to say—I’m starving—not as long as there really are starving kids in the world.

I’m hungry is the proper way to say it.

“I’m hungry,” he says.

He goes to the fridge, looking for milk to go with the Pizza Pops, and there’s Karla Norman’s chocolate birthday cake sitting on a shelf under its plastic cover, only he doesn’t know it’s Karla’s cake.

“Who’s the cake for?” he asks.

Vicki looks at the kids, at Martin who held the cake on his lap most of the day. “We can’t remember,” she says. “I guess it must be for us.”

Fire in the Hole

With the day’s last light on the horizon and a can of no-name cola in his hand, Hank stands next to the buffalo stone— his buffalo stone, he thinks—and stares at the beer box of empties and the container of insect repellent that someone left behind. The same damned someone who left the gate open. Maybe even the same someone who covered the rock, once again, with graffiti and made him susceptible, once again, to the presence of the historical society and an art restorer in his pasture. Luckily, at this time of the evening his calves are by the slough to the west. It had been the last straw, though, the gate again, and then the beer box and his discovery of the new graffiti, the outlines of hands in pink and green and yellow as though his pasture were a public park. Hank had loaded into his truck box what he figured he needed to solve the problem once and for all, but now he scratches his head and stares at the stone and doesn’t know what to do next. What seemed like a good idea an hour ago is starting to look like less of a good idea, due to his lack of expertise about what could be a hazardous venture. There’s only one person Hank can think of who knows anything about blasting and that’s old TNT Norman. He lives with his daughter now, Karla, and Hank figures he can’t be calling her house at this hour, at least not without knowing that she stays up past ten.

He decides there’s no harm in driving by the house to see if there’s a light on since he can’t very well just guess at this, and when he gets there the older daughter—Lou, the one who is so hard to get along with—is sitting out front in her car reading a magazine under the dome light with old man Norman in the back seat. Hank parks his truck behind the car and he can see Lou looking in the rear-view mirror to see who’s pulling up behind her. Hank steps out of the truck and walks over to her open window.

“Howdy,” he says. “Nice night. Hey there, Wally. How’re you doing?”

“Nice night for sitting out here wasting time, waiting on that inconsiderate sister of mine,” says Lou. “I missed a perfectly good candle party because of her. She’s selfish, that’s what she is.”

Hank wonders why they’re waiting in the car, but he doesn’t ask. “Funny thing,” he says, “but I need some advice. Mind if I climb in the back seat and ask your dad a few questions?”

“Go ahead,” says Lou. “As you can see, we’re not going anywhere.”

Hank opens the back door and gets in. He’s still carrying his can of cola, which he drains, and then he isn’t sure what to do with the can. If he were in his own vehicle he’d drop it on the floor. Old TNT is slumped against the far door, the ravages of the stroke showing in his flaccid face and the way his body looks loose, like he has no bones. Why Lou hasn’t taken him in the house is beyond him, but then Lou has a reputation for being ornery. She had a husband once and it was no surprise to anyone when he took off with another woman.

“So, Wally,” Hank says, “I seem to recall that you did a little blasting back in your pipeline days.”

TNT Norman perks up considerably when he hears the word blasting, and shifts his weight awkwardly so that he’s leaning toward Hank instead of against the car door.

“I was wondering if you could give me a few instructions on how to blast that old buffalo stone out of my pasture,” Hank says. “Damned tired of the kids leaving the gate open and letting my cows out.”

“Yup, yup,” Walter Norman says, and Hank wonders if maybe his mind is too far gone for him to remember what Hank needs to know.

But then the old man asks what Hank has for blasting powder. Hank can’t understand him at first, his voice is so quiet, and he leans closer and asks Walter to repeat what he said. This time Hank understands and he tells him dynamite. He’s had it out in his shed for a while—thought he might need it for the new well, but then he didn’t after all and it’s been sitting around in the shed, probably should have found a safer place but no harm done. Hank lists what else he has in the truck, and Walter says quietly, “Good, good, good, that ought to do ’er.”

Then Lou puts down her magazine and turns around and says, “I have a dandy idea.”

And that’s how Hank ends up heading back toward the pasture with old man Norman in his truck, his wheelchair in the box with the blasting supplies. Lou’s instructions are to take him home to Karla when they’re done, and if Karla isn’t home, to deliver him to Lou’s house. She’d asked the old man if he needed to go to the bathroom and he’d said no, and Hank hoped that he knew what he was saying.

When they get back to the pasture Hank opens the gate and drives the truck up to the stone and then he gets the old man out and into his wheelchair. The mosquitoes are bad, so Hank sprays himself and Walter with the can of repellent that’s sitting on the stone’s flat surface. The old man’s eyes light up when he sees the box of beer on the stone but Hank disappoints him by telling him it’s full of empties.

“Anyway,” Hank says, “we’re both as dried out as Methuselah these days and that’s likely a good thing, eh.”

The old man still looks disappointed.

With Walter Norman giving instructions, Hank grips the auger’s handle and begins to twist it into the ground, leaning on it with his weight. Three blasting holes, the old man advises, six feet deep if Hank can manage that. His auger won’t go down that far, but Hank figures he can go four and a bit. Good enough. He gets as close to the stone as he can, angles under as much as possible. The daylight is completely gone but the moon is bright and Hank can see what he’s doing. A light breeze comes up, which makes things easier. It blows the mosquitoes off and cools Hank down. As he digs, old man Norman relates the story about blasting the dugout and the barn being blown all over the country. The old man speaks so softly that Hank has to listen hard to hear, but it doesn’t matter because he’s heard the story at least a dozen times before. It was one of the old man’s favourite bar tales when he was still drinking. Hank was still drinking back then too, so he’d been in the Juliet Hotel bar on several occasions when it was told. Tonight, old TNT adds a part about the wife’s laundry ending up full of holes and Hank hadn’t heard that before.

Because the soil is so sandy, it takes Hank less than an hour to get the three holes dug, and then he lays the dynamite and lead-in line according to TNT’s instructions and fills in the holes with gravel and soil and tamps it down. Once that’s done, he loads his shovel and auger into the truck box and moves the truck back to the approach, and then he moves the old man, pushing him in the wheelchair across the rough pasture trail. He runs lead-in line from the blasting holes over to the truck and attaches the detonators. When Hank has everything ready he looks at old TNT in his wheelchair and sees that he can hardly contain his excitement. He’s practically bouncing in his chair in spite of his paralysis, as though this is the most exciting thing that’s happened to him in ages. Hank doesn’t doubt that it is.

“Are we ready?” Hank asks.

“We sure as hell are,” the old man says, and then he shouts something as loudly as he can, which isn’t very loud. It comes out as an elongated grunt and Hank can’t make out the words.

“What was that?” Hank asks, and this time he gets it. “Fire in the hole,” the old man is saying, and Hank thinks that’s so funny he laughs and then he shouts it himself, “Fire in the hole!” and Hank’s voice is a good deal louder than old man Norman’s. Then he detonates the blasts, one at a time.

Nothing much happens. They can hear the blasts all right, and dirt and gravel fly up out of the holes in the moonlight. But no big pieces of rock arc through the air, and once the dirt settles, the dark shape of the stone remains unchanged as far as Hank can see. The two men stare at the silhouette as though something might yet happen, another blast might rocket the whole massive stone, but it sits where it is and the night grows quiet again except for the mosquitoes and Hank’s cows bawling off to the west.

“Should we have a look?” Hank asks, and then he wheels the old man through the pasture once again toward the stone. Pushing the wheelchair along the rough trail takes more effort than digging the holes did and Hank works up a good sweat.

When they get to the stone, they see the auger holes have expanded considerably in size, but other than that, the stone looks the same. The beer box is still sitting on top, just as it was before, not even disturbed, Hank thinks, but when he picks it up he sees that the bottles have disintegrated into a pile of glass in the bottom.

“How about that,” Hank says, shaking the box and listening to the tinkle of the broken glass.

The old man looks puzzled. “I thought we had ’er,” he says.

“That dynamite was sitting around for some time,” Hank says. “Maybe it was past the best-before date.” He puts the beer box on the old man’s lap and says, “I don’t think I’m good for another go tonight. Best get you home.”

He pushes Walter back across the pasture to the truck, the glass tinkling whenever they hit a bump in the trail, and when they’re just about to the gate they hear a crack, like river ice in the spring, and when Hank turns around he can see that the rock has split in two. Right up the middle, two near-perfect halves in the moonlight, and he turns the old man around so he can see it too.

“That’s not really what I had in mind,” Hank says.

“I figured we had ’er,” the old man says again.

Hank would like to go back and have a look at the stone but he’s had enough of wheeling old TNT around the pasture.

When he gets Walter into the truck and his wheelchair in the box, he goes back and pulls the wire gate tight to the fence post and latches it up. Then he gets into the cab and hauls the remains of his six-pack of cola into the front seat. He hands a can to Walter and cracks one for himself. It’s warm, but it still tastes good. He sees Walter struggling with the tab, so he turns the dome light on, but even then Walter can’t get it, doesn’t have the strength to peel it back, and so Hank does it for him and then Walter shakily lifts the can to his lips and spills some down his front and Hank pretends he doesn’t notice.

“Well, we did half a night’s work anyway,” Hank says, and old TNT says, “We sure did, we got ’er half done anyway,” and then he says, “I want to thank you, Hank.” Quietly, but Hank hears it.

“Hell,” Hank says. “You don’t have to thank me. I should be thanking you. Wouldn’t have got anywhere without a foreman. Likely would have blown myself up.”

And they leave it at that.

When Hank gets to Karla’s house, there are no lights on. Hank is going to take the old man over to Lou’s, but then Walter tells him to just take him inside.

“I don’t know,” Hank says. “I’m a little scared of that Lou. Maybe I should do what I was told, eh.” He tries to make a joke out if it and cajole the old man into agreeing to go to Lou’s, but TNT insists that he wants to stay at Karla’s and he says that Karla will be home sooner or later. He’s just going to go to bed. He’ll be okay on his own.

When they get inside Hank finds out that he has to help the old man onto and off of the toilet, and then out of his clothes and into a pair of cotton pyjamas. He doesn’t mind. Fair trade, he figures, for the help with the blasting. He gets Walter a glass of water, just like you would a child, and then he helps him into bed. He turns out the lights, all but a lamp by the couch in the living room. He sees the little pile of sheets and blankets on the floor by the couch and supposes that this is where Karla sleeps. Lucky man, he thinks, to have a daughter who’ll take care of him like that. He wonders what it is he can smell in the air and then remembers that Karla does hair. He thinks she’s done Lynn’s hair a time or two. He hears a rooster crow from someplace close by and wonders what a rooster is doing in town, and crowing at this time of the night. Must be lost, a country rooster lost in town.

When he gets outside, the rooster is sitting on the hood of his truck. It looks at him and crow-hops a bit, up and down on the hood, but it doesn’t scramble off, so Hank makes a grab for it and catches it by the legs. He holds it squawking upside down, not sure what to do with it now that he has it. It’s a bantam rooster, too scrawny for the stewpot, but kind of pretty. He can see the green and rusty colours under the street lamp. He decides any rooster that is found hopping around on the hood of his truck belongs to him, finders keepers, and he opens the door and tosses the rooster into the cab. Lynn has a few chickens. He’ll add this one to her flock. The rooster settles right down on the seat of the cab like it’s used to riding around in trucks.

On the way home Hank decides to stop and have another look at the stone, and when he’s walking up to it he sees that his yearlings have made their way around to this corner of the pasture and the way they’re standing makes him think of buffalo, and he can almost see the giant beasts wallowing in the dust and scratching up against the stone to rid themselves of their winter coats. And when he thinks of the buffalo he almost feels bad that he’s split the stone in two instead of leaving it up to nature to decide when it’s time for change. He walks around the stone, taking care not to stumble in a hole, and he leans in and runs his hand against the clean hard split. There’s a V between the two pieces, and the way the moonlight shines through, it looks like a gorge or a canyon, or perhaps the Red Sea parting. Hank steps through the opening and when he emerges on the other side he sees a white-faced steer staring at him. The moonlight shines on a pink fluorescent hand painting, and he places his own hand over the outline but his hand is much bigger, so he walks around the stone and tries a few more until he finds a lime green one that fits. He thinks about the compulsion humans seem to have for leaving their mark, the kids are no different, and maybe the art restorer would be kind of interesting with her white gloves and fancy tools and little jars of chemicals, like a scientist. Although her tools wouldn’t help her repair this latest assault on the stone, the split down the middle.

He decides to leave the stone the way it is, not to try again to blast it to pieces. Maybe the split will be enough to keep the kids out of his pasture, since the stone no longer looks like a tabletop. He comes up with an official story: What next? If it’s not beer, it’s blasting caps. Just lucky they didn’t hurt themselves, or start a grass fire. If you stick to your story, who’s going to argue? Two people already know the truth—Lou and old TNT—but it’s his pasture, he can say what he likes.

Hank walks back to his truck and cracks the last can in his six-pack of cola. He heads home, taking a shortcut across the pasture to the west, the truck bumping over the rocks and the gopher holes. He hopes Lynn is there. She stays in the restaurant as late as midnight if there are customers, but if it’s dead she closes up early. Won’t she be surprised, he thinks, looking at the rooster on the seat beside him. The fine-feathered present for his wife has settled in like a lapdog.