Offerings

It’s late, almost midnight, when the owner of the lost horse pulls into the Oasis Café for a bite to eat. The parking lot is pretty much empty, just two semi-trailers and a half-ton, a car parked close to the door, a motorcycle in front of the Petro-Can. For a moment Joni worries that the restaurant might be closed but then she sees the lights on inside and she picks out two men—probably the truckers—sitting at a table by the window. She steps into the foyer between the Petro-Can and the restaurant and stops to look at the bulletin board, which is plastered with notices and ads: livestock sales, sports days, farm auctions, equipment for sale. There’s an ad for taxidermy services, a plea for hay from someone in Alberta. She finds a pen in her purse but no paper, so she takes the hay notice and flips it over and writes: Missing. Grey Arab gelding. Call Joni. And then her cell phone number. As she looks for a good place to stick her note, her eye lands on a small, plain poster in black and white, with photographs of children who are missing. Several of the photos are identified as being computer-aged. She thinks about her grandchildren—the ones she’s never met—as she studies the photos, and wonders if these posters do any good, if any of these children are ever found. Would she recognize a child from the poster, she wonders, if a car pulled up right now and the child got out and spoke to her, said hello, or asked for directions to the washroom or a pay phone? She wonders if she’d recognize her grandchildren from their pictures if they walked up to her on the street. Probably not.

There’s a bare spot on the board next to the drive-in movie listings. Joni pins her missing horse notice there and then reaches into her purse and turns her phone back on, thinking it must be safe to do so by now. She sees a pink highlighter pen among the gum boxes and gas receipts and other detritus in her purse, and she decides to highlight her notice to make it stand out. At that moment, a woman with an apron comes from the restaurant and passes her on her way to the washroom, a middle-aged woman with roots in need of a touch-up. She’s wearing pointed leather shoes that look like cowboy boots and Joni wonders how her feet can stand them.

“Hello there,” the woman says, but she’s all business, so Joni doesn’t bother to answer.

Joni draws a pink circle around Grey Arab gelding, and then enters the restaurant. She’s looking around, trying to decide where to sit, when her phone rings. She curses under her breath, then she reaches into her purse and turns the phone off again.

When she looks up, she notices an older man in a plaid shirt watching her from where he sits alone at a table. He sees he’s been caught staring and says, “Damned phones, eh. A person could be up there in the Arctic, sitting on an iceberg, and someone would be trying to get him on the phone.”

“No hiding from the phone,” she agrees. She’s been trying all day.

This restaurant is like an iceberg, she thinks, thanks to the air conditioning, and she wishes she’d brought a sweater in with her. She chooses a table by the window and sits, thinking about what she should order to ease her hunger this late at night. She has sandwich fixings in a cooler in the truck but it’s too much trouble to get everything out in the dark. There’s a menu on the table and she studies it, trying to decide between something reasonably light (soup du jour and a bun) and the full meal deal (a burger with fries and coleslaw).

The cold air makes her shiver, and it hits her how tired she is. She wishes she were in Peace River, or at least Edmonton, instead of freezing in an over air-conditioned restaurant in a town she’s never heard of. If it weren’t for that damned horse, she thinks, although it had been her own rash act that had put the horse in her possession in the first place, and she should have known that it would sprout feathers and turn into an albatross. As she searched the countryside around Juliet, she’d been tempted by the idea of leaving without the horse, selling the trailer cheap to the first dealer she could find, stopping somewhere to buy appropriate gifts for the children—lego, books, video games—and then carrying on unencumbered. But she was worried about the horse, that he’d been chased by coyotes or whatever chases horses, or got tangled in a fence, and she couldn’t just leave, so she’d driven the grid roads and had somehow ended up at a surprising stretch of yellow sand that rose in dunes as far she could see. She remembered the old cowboy in the campground mentioning the sand hills, and then the woman in the post office had waxed on about them as though they were a wonder of the world that shouldn’t be missed. Joni hadn’t paid much attention. She’d passed several such promises on her way through Saskatchewan, aimed at making people stop on their way to somewhere else: mysterious tunnels under Main Street, country mansions built and abandoned by old-world gentry, the longest bridge over the shortest span of water.

Still, the sight of the dunes had tempted her enough that she’d parked her truck in the yard of an old schoolhouse and found a faint trail to follow on foot. It was mostly covered over by sand, but she could make out the two vehicle tracks worn into the surface and it was enough of a trail that she could stick to it and not risk getting lost. When she left the trail to climb one of the dunes and looked to the west where the sun was shining hot on the waves of sand, she’d thought, The woman in the post office was right, these hills are a wonder. The landscape was so vast and simple, reduced to sky and grass and sand. Yet in the surface at her feet, she saw patterns as intricate and complicated as the veins in an insect’s wings. The discovery of this spot was almost worth the aggravation of the missing horse.

A rogue gust blew sand in her eyes and she had to turn away, blinking, her eyes watering. When they cleared, she slid back down the dune, and when she got to the bottom she saw something at her feet, mostly buried in the sand, a leather strap, so she reached down and pulled on it and it came loose. It looked like an old halter. The leather was warm in her hand from the sun and cracked and dry as toast, but it was in one piece, still buckled as though whatever had been wearing it had sloughed it off and wandered on without it. She wondered what else was buried under all this sand. She thought of taking the halter with her, but then she laid it back down to be covered up again.

She’d returned to her truck then and driven more miles around the countryside, checking herds of horses in pastures, stopping at farmhouses to inquire. She came to a Catholic church out in the middle of nowhere, and across the road, an old woman named Anna working in her flower bed. When Joni asked her about the horse, she nodded and said, “You talk to that boy, Lee Torgeson. He might know something about your horse.” Joni had imagined a ten-year-old. Then Anna had insisted she come into the house for coffee, and Joni couldn’t say no and ended up telling Anna about her grandchildren and showing her the school pictures, and Anna had gushed appropriately over them. When Joni finished her coffee Anna had provided directions to the Torgeson place, back the way she’d come, but when Joni got to the farm there was no one there. Just a black-and-white dog that barked a few times and then came and rolled at her feet. More driving around until after dark and the hunger pangs got to her, and she’d seen the Oasis sign and pulled in.

Joni makes up her mind to stick with the soup du jour, whatever it turns out to be, because it’s too late to be eating a big meal. Potato soup would hit the spot. She could hope for potato. When the woman in the apron comes back into the restaurant—the waitress, Joni assumes—she closes the menu to indicate she’s ready to order. She should maybe ask what kind of soup the du jour is just in case it’s clam chowder. Seafood that’s been sitting on a warming plate for hours is not likely a good idea.

The waitress doesn’t make a move toward her table and Joni begins to wonder if this is the kind of place where you help yourself, like a cafeteria, or maybe go to the counter to place your order. She looks around and doesn’t see any kind of buffet table. She holds up her menu. The waitress just stares at her, or perhaps glares would be a better word. Joni wonders if maybe she missed seeing a closed sign hanging on the door, and is about to get up and ask if she’s too late to get a bite to eat, when the woman strides over to her table and says, “What can I get you?”

“Just soup. Du jour. And a bun. What is the soup? I guess I should ask that.”

“Beef barley.”

She wants to ask about potato but is afraid to, the way the waitress is looking at her. “Beef barley’s good,” she says. “I’ll have that. And a bun.”

“A bun. So you said. You can help yourself to coffee.” The waitress turns and goes through the swinging doors to the kitchen.

Before Joni can get up to help herself to coffee, the man in the plaid shirt says, “I’ll get that. You just sit.” He gets a mug and the pot from the burner and carries them to Joni’s table, where he sets the mug down and fills it without saying anything else.

“Thanks,” she says.

He responds with a nod. Then he fills his own cup before he puts the pot back on the burner.

Joni shivers and wraps her hands around the hot mug, wishing again that she’d put on a sweater or even a jacket. The waitress comes back through the kitchen doors and slaps Joni’s soup down in front of her. The broth slops over the edge of the bowl and splashes the bun.

“Thanks,” Joni says. She’s thinking how strange this is, this bitchy waitress, but the soup smells good and she would have dipped the bun anyway.

The two truckers stand up from their table and make their way to the cash register.

“Sorry,” one of them says to the waitress, “nothing smaller than a twenty.”

“I thought you were a big tipper,” she says, following them.

“Not that big.”

After they leave, Joni can see the waitress is watching her again from behind the till. It’s unnerving.

When the man in the plaid shirt says, “I wouldn’t mind another slice of that pie,” the waitress goes through the swinging doors and returns with a plate of something lime green.

“This is the last piece for you, Willard,” she says to him. “You’ll be turning green.” She sets the plate on the table in front of him and asks, “So how’s the movie business treating you?”

“Marian’s doing the movie tonight,” he says.

The waitress goes back behind the till counter and begins replacing the menu inserts with new ones for the next day. Joni finishes her soup and pushes the plate and bowl aside. She watches as the man Willard eats the pie, wondering if she should maybe try a piece. As soon as he’s done he slides away from his table and stands, searching through his pockets. He checks one pocket, and the next, and the next, and then an expression crosses his face that clearly means he’s realized he has no money with him.

“I left the house in such a hurry,” he says.

“Don’t worry about it,” the waitress says. “If I can’t trust you, I might as well pack it in right now and give up on humanity.”

Still, he stands there.

“Everything okay?” the waitress asks.

Willard licks his lips. “That pie was good all right,” he says. And still he stands.

“Willard,” the waitress says, looking alarmed. “If there’s something wrong . . .”

And then he quickly turns on his heel and leaves, muttering something about Marian and the drive-in and all those kids who need a man to keep them in line. Through the restaurant window Joni can see him hurrying across the parking lot. He backs his truck out and onto the highway so quickly he hardly looks to see if another vehicle is approaching.

Joni is now alone with the waitress in the restaurant and she decides it’s time for her to leave too. She reaches for her purse, but then the waitress approaches Joni’s table, stops right next to it and says, “Just turn your damned phone on.”

“Excuse me?” Joni says.

“Your cell phone,” the waitress says. “Turn it on.”

Joni would love to tell this rude woman to go to hell, she can keep her green pie, it’s probably not real food anyway, but then the waitress sighs deeply, and when Joni looks at her face she sees that the glare is gone and the woman looks very tired, just the way she feels herself. Joni reaches into her purse, takes out her phone and switches the power on. The waitress takes her own phone out of her apron pocket and dials a number. Joni’s ring-tone sounds. Once. Twice. The waitress switches her own phone off and the ring-tone stops.

“What the hell,” Joni says.

“Yeah. What the hell.” The waitress turns to walk away.

“Wait a minute,” Joni says. “You’re the one who’s been calling me all day?”

“Looks that way.”

“Why? And how did you get my number?”

“I got your number out of my husband’s back pocket.”

“Well, frankly,” Joni says, “that doesn’t make sense. I’m not in the habit of handing out my phone number . . .” She stops, remembering that she gave her number to a cowboy in the campground that morning. “Wait a minute.”

“Never mind,” the waitress says. “No explanation needed. I read your notice out there. The mistake was mine. I thought I had a missing husband, turns out you had a missing horse. So sorry about all the calls. I went nuts for a while. There’s a story but you don’t want to hear it.”

“I might,” says Joni.

“Well, I don’t want to tell it.”

The waitress goes through the doors to the kitchen again and Joni thinks, That’s that, but then the woman returns with a slice of the green pie.

“On the house,” she says.

Joni isn’t altogether sure she should eat the pie given the waitress’s suspicion about her cheating husband, but the woman says, “Don’t worry, I’m not planning to poison you. It’s a new recipe. I’ve been trying it out on my preferred customers all day. I figure I owe you at least a slice of pie. Like I said, I don’t know what got into me.”

Joni takes a tentative bite. The lime flavour dances on her tongue. “Wow,” she says. “Very tasty.”

“That seems to be the general opinion,” the waitress says. “It’s going on the menu. Anyway, I’ll leave you to your coffee. I’ve got some cleaning up to do in the kitchen.”

She looks so tired and depressed that Joni says, “Hey, don’t worry about the phone calls. It doesn’t matter. Really.”

“You’re not about to run off with my husband, are you,” the woman says. It’s not even a question.

“No,” Joni says, “definitely not.”

“Christ, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Well, for one thing, my feet hurt. I do know that.”

Joni looks down at the woman’s feet, the pointed leather shoes, and then sticks one of her own feet out from under the table, shows off her new green cross-trainers.

“Running shoes,” she says. “I never wear anything else any more.”

“Just one more sign that you’re on the downward slope. Practical footwear. Not that those are especially practical, not the colour anyway. No offence.”

“Why don’t you sit down?” Joni says. “Take a load off.” She should probably just leave and let the poor woman go home to bed, but the way she’s standing by the table, she looks as though she would dearly love to get off her feet.

Joni’s assessment is right because the waitress, Lynn is her name, pours herself a cup of coffee, refills Joni’s cup and sits across from her.

And then Joni can’t stop herself. She asks Lynn if she has any grandkids, and when Lynn says no, Joni takes out the pictures of her own grandchildren. In spite of the fact that Lynn harassed her with phone calls all day long and behaved so rudely before revealing her motive, Joni tells her reunion story. She knows there’s no reason for Lynn to be interested, but she just can’t help talking about her newfound family, proudly showing off the school pictures when she doesn’t know yet whether she has a reason to be proud. But these children are her offspring. Whatever is in the past between her and her daughter, she tells Joni, whatever happens when they meet again, maybe she can help in some way. She wishes she had more money. That’s likely what her daughter needs more than anything.

Lynn expresses the opinion that the boys are fine-looking kids, and Joni agrees and puts the pictures away. Lynn looks out the window, at the truck and trailer under the light in the parking lot.

“That must be your rig out there,” she says.

“Unfortunately,” Joni says. And she tells Lynn the rest of the story—the foolish purchase of the now-missing horse.

And then, a development Joni could not possibly have predicted when she walked through the restaurant door: Lynn says, “Tell you what. I’ll buy that horse from you, and when I track him down, I’ll find him a good home. Someone around here will want him.”

Joni is stunned. “Why would you do that?” she asks. “For a stranger?”

Lynn says, “I’d like to say it’s because I’m a good old-fashioned nice person. But I’m not. I’m hard to get along with—just ask the girls who work for me—and most of the time I can’t be bothered doing favours for people.” She looks out the window again and nods at the truck and trailer. “What I really want is your trailer. If I buy the horse, I assume you won’t need the trailer any more and you’ll be open to offers.”

Such a relief, Joni can’t believe it, horse trouble dissipating just like that. Lynn goes for her cheque book, and Joni is free of the burden she’s been dragging around since the auctioneer said Sold and pointed in her direction. And then Lynn surprises Joni again by laughing. At the circumstance that put the trailer in her possession—the phone calls, the ridiculousness of it all—and Joni thinks how Lynn looks like a different person when she laughs, how laughing makes everyone look better and she should remember to do it herself, often, when she’s with her daughter again, because there hadn’t been much laughing in those last ugly years before the girl left to live with her father. And she should laugh right off when she meets her grandsons, she thinks, to make a good impression.

“Well,” Lynn says, looking at the clock on the wall. “It’s been nice doing business, but I suppose it’s time to get this placed closed up.” She asks Joni if she has an e-mail address so she can let her know about the horse, one way or the other, but Joni doesn’t have one. She says, “You’ve got my cell number,” and they both have a good laugh about that. Lynn walks out to the lot with Joni and helps her with the trailer hitch, and then Joni pulls away, free of the trailer, and heads back to the campground for the night.

Once she’s gone, Lynn goes inside and carries the last remaining plates and coffee cups to the kitchen and washes them and wipes down the tables and, finally, turns out the lights. As she leaves the dark restaurant and looks across the lot at the trailer, she’s pleased that she has a surprise for her husband. A present—a little rusty but good enough—to make up for the fact that she had, briefly, lost faith.

Cowboy

Sometime after midnight Lila hears Kyle’s truck on the street in front of the house. It’s unmistakable. The truck stops, and a door slams, and Kyle’s boots sound on the step. The doorbell.

Lila quickly goes to the door before the bell wakes Rachelle. When she opens it, Kyle teeters on the top step. She can see that he’s left the lights on in his truck.

Kyle looks terrible, worse than she does, Lila thinks. She’d like to believe that when Rachelle told him she wasn’t going to marry him—she assumes Rachelle was the one who broke it off—Kyle drank himself into this state out of hurt and heartache, but then she remembers the night before, Kyle passed out in the backyard, and a few other times that she was pretty sure he’d been drinking, even though she’d argued with Norval that Kyle was a responsible boy who wouldn’t dream of getting behind the wheel of a car with alcohol in his veins. Maybe Norval was right, the wedding had been a mistake from the beginning. She is suddenly so very sick of the soap opera of her daughter’s love life.

“You can’t drive home in that state,” Lila says. “You just can’t.”

Kyle asks if he can see Rachelle, and Lila thinks he is saying something about sorry but she can’t make it out, his words are so slurred.

“How could you allow yourself to drive?” Lila says. “You could have killed someone. No one would forgive you for that, Kyle. No one. It would haunt you for the rest of your life.”

He stares at her, as though he just can’t process what she’s said.

“Get in here,” Lila says.

Kyle steps inside and the smell of alcohol fills the foyer. Kyle struggles to get his boots off without falling, and when he finally does, he starts for the stairs to where the bedrooms are.

“No,” Lila says. “Not that way.”

Kyle stops and looks at her. She points down, to where there’s a basement recreation room with a pool table, a pullout couch and a bathroom. “You can talk to Rachelle in the morning. She’s going to need you then, Kyle, if that means anything to you at all.”

Kyle obediently turns and stumbles past Lila and goes down the carpeted stairs to the basement. She thinks about leaving his truck lights on all night to teach him a lesson, but then she thinks again about morning and how she and Rachelle will need all the strength they have to get through the day, and Kyle’s truck with a dead battery will be just one more impossible detail. She goes outside and switches off the lights, and on her way back up the walk she notices again Norval’s lawn. It’s a dense, green, beautiful lawn, even if it is overgrown. She’s been lobbying for some kind for xeriscaping, which she read about in a garden magazine. This would entail getting rid of the grass entirely and installing in its stead materials that require no watering. And, of course, no mowing. She wonders why this had seemed like a good idea when Norval had so loved his lawn, and the act of mowing. She doesn’t understand herself.

She steps back into the house and locks the door, then decides she’d better go downstairs and check on Kyle. She finds him passed out on the pool table, curled into a fetal position like a little boy, although he is far from little. These children, Lila thinks. These foolish, ignorant children. How in the world will she deal with them without Norval? She flicks off the light and climbs heavily up the stairs to the living room, where she sits once again in the armchair and takes up her box of Kleenex, knowing that she must be brave, she must tell Rachelle, she cannot put it off much longer. She turns on the television, which is on Norval’s favourite channel, and watches the weather forecasts for the Atlantic provinces and the Far North and Mexico and Russia and the south of France.

For the first time she understands the appeal of the Weather Channel, the lulling monotony of weather. She will let it soothe her for a time, she decides, a short time, and then she will wake Rachelle and lead her—or drag her, if need be—through the door to adulthood.

Your father loved you very much is how she will begin.

Wreckage

When Vicki hears the plane this time, she is positive she’s awake. She hears a hiccup, and another one, and then silence, a long awful silence, and the sound of a crash. Close by. It had to be, or she wouldn’t have heard it.

She shakes Blaine, switches on the bedside lamp, shakes him again.

“Blaine,” she says, “I just heard a plane go down. I’m not sure where, but close.”

Blaine stares at her, uncomprehending. His eyelids flutter, then close.

“I’m sure, Blaine,” she says, shaking him awake. “We have to look.”

“Not the damned beans again,” Blaine says, rolling away from her.

“Not beans,” Vicki says, poking him with her foot. “An airplane.”

“You look for it. And turn that light out.”

Vicki slides her bare feet into the easiest things, her worn old plastic flip-flops. She switches off the light and leaves the bedroom, slips through the kitchen and out the door, from one darkness to another, and stands in the yard looking, trying to decide which way to go. She can’t believe that this has really happened after all the years of dreaming, that she is really heading out to look for a downed plane and its pilot, passengers if there are any. She has no idea where to turn. The sound had been overhead. Right inside her head, in fact, directionless. She scans the horizon, looking for lights or fire. Nothing. She listens. Nothing but silence. She takes a step toward the pasture fence, thinking she will try that way.

But before she is across the yard it all fades—the sound overhead, the crash, the dread. She can feel it fading, becoming less and less real, and in no time at all it’s turned into the same pleasant sensation she felt in her old dream about paddling across the lake in a canoe. No droning sound of a falling plane, just the splash of her paddles. She stops. She’s aware now of dew in the grass; she can feel it through the plastic straps of her flip-flops. She listens to the sound of a cricket, leaves rustling in the stiff breeze that’s come up, an owl somewhere to the east. Not the sounds of mayhem. Perhaps she just doesn’t want to go looking, she thinks. She doesn’t want to find burning debris, or worse, human remains. But in no time even these thoughts are gone and she’s left standing in the yard, feeling foolish.

She returns to the house in a sleepy stupor, shakes the sandals from her feet and crawls back into bed. She rolls up against Blaine’s warm back, but he mumbles “too hot” and gently pushes her away. She knows, because Blaine told her, that he poured kerosene on the beans and burned them, and the thought of all those beans reduced to ash makes her want to whisper in his ear: Thank you, sweetheart. Which she does before she obediently rolls back to her own side of the bed.

Beneath Vicki and Blaine, in his second night in his own room, Shiloh lies awake, his light shining on the rodeo poster of the bull rider with the purple-and-gold chaps. He imagines the bull rider flying off the bull and landing hard on a hip or a shoulder, can just feel him flying through the air, feel the pain as he hits the dirt. Or maybe he gets hung up in the well as the bull spins, struggling to get his hand free from the bull rope, his life depending on his ability to stay on his feet, his arm practically pulled from its socket, until he’s free from the rope, the suicide wrap, then an adrenalin-fuelled dash to the chutes to grab a rail and hoist himself up and out of the bull’s way. Dropping down onto his feet again once the bull is heading for the gate, a tip of his hat, now feeling the hurt, on his knees in front of all those people, the breath sucked right out of him, until he’s helped to his feet by another pair of cowboys. Let’s make this young cowboy feel a little better about bein’ bucked off, the announcer says, show him that you appreciate his effort. And the fans applaud.

He, Shiloh Dolson, got bucked off a horse today. His hip hurts where he landed and he’s already got a huge black bruise that he won’t be showing to his mother, not to anyone. He’s proud of that bruise, though. He hopes it lasts for a few days at least, a secret that he alone knows about. He rolls over onto his sore hip just so he can feel the bruise. It’s the first time in his life he’s been bucked off a horse. He’s fallen off a couple of times, soft landings in the dirt, but Blaine never put a kid on a horse that he didn’t trust. He wouldn’t let the kids, not even Shiloh, ride Buck.

Shiloh’s hip hurts too much and he has to roll over again and take his weight off the bruise. He wonders if any other parts of his body will hurt tomorrow. He imagines himself walking up the alley behind Brittney Vass’s house wearing chaps—maybe not purple, though—bruised and limping and dragging a bull rope, the cowbell clanging as he walks. Brittney watching him over her backyard fence. But he won’t look her way, not even a glance, won’t let on that he knows she’s there. It’s pleasing, this vision of himself. He closes his eyes.

He’s almost asleep but the light is bothering him. He can see it through his eyelids. He reaches over to switch it off and sees the bull rider’s face.

The face is his, and he’s not dreaming.

Ghost

There’s just enough light from the moon that Willard thinks he sees Marian put her finger to her lips, and then she crosses the linoleum floor and when she’s halfway between the door and his bed he can see that, yes, she does have her finger to her lips and she’s whispering, shhhh, as though there’s someone else besides Willard who might hear.

When Marian lifts Willard’s covers, lifts her nightgown, removes her nightgown, he couldn’t be more astonished. It takes a minute and the warmth of Marian’s body for him to realize that she hasn’t come to talk, that words aren’t, in fact, needed. Marian kneels over him, and Willard isn’t sure what to do. He should say something—Christ, woman, stop whatever it is that you’re doing—but he doesn’t want her to stop, feels all his pent-up love for her rushing to that one mysterious organ. His hands rise and he places them on her white thighs. Shhhh, she says again, now lowering herself to meet his naked body—there’s that word, body, he wonders if he said it out loud, but shhhh is the only sound he hears— and he’s ready for her—another surprise—and he closes his eyes and surrenders until a shudder passes through him and he moans, he can’t help it. He’s embarrassed at the guttural sound. The warmth he feels makes him want to talk, makes him want to say things, but there are no words in his head. Only fragments, nine years’ worth of words and phrases and truncations. He has to say something, for her sake, but what? All they’ve ever spoken about is business (the drive-in) and household appliances (the dishwasher with its tendency to leak) and who’s going to pick up the mail (usually Willard). Her name, he thinks, I could say her name, and he’s about to utter it, or try to, when Marian moves her finger from her lips to his, touches him gently, then lifts herself off him, out of the bed. She picks up her nightgown from where it has fallen and she turns, and her bare feet carry her across the floor, away from him, and she disappears.

Silence. The vapoury stillness of night almost unbearable. Willard wants the dog to bark, a truck to pass, a crack of thunder, anything to bring him back to what is familiar. But why? The last few minutes were perhaps the most pleasurable he’s experienced since childhood. He closes his eyes and tries to hang on to the feeling but it fades and then a truck does pass and the dog barks, and he’s no longer sure if Marian really came to him or if he spilled his own warmth in a dark dream.

He can’t sleep. In fact, he doesn’t want to sleep. He lies awake, listening to the dog bark but not registering that his dog is barking, and wonders what is ahead. He tingles with expectation, although he has no idea where this night is going to take him. Perhaps nowhere. He knows that in the darkness the edges of things are blurred—the past and the present, dreams and memory and time. He doesn’t try to understand Marian’s ghostly visit. One word rolls around in his head, over and over, the word lovers.

Even as the dog barks and a teenage boy lights the wick of a crude Molotov cocktail, his friends hanging back, not as brave, and throws it as hard as he can toward the dark shadow of the movie screen.

Even as the fire catches in the dry grass, flames licking at the looming wooden structure, the dog barking furiously now, and Marian returns to Willard’s doorway and says, “Willard, the dog. I think the kids are out there again.”

The two of them, Willard pulling on a pair of pants and Marian in her nightgown, out the door to be greeted by the sight of fire, a real fire this time. Marian gasps, is ready to run with a bucket of water, but Willard holds her back and says, “Too late. Let it go.” Then, “Don’t go, Marian. Don’t leave me. I love you.”

Surprising the absolute hell out of himself.

And then he quickly goes back inside to the phone and calls the volunteer fire department to keep the fire from spreading through the grass, it’s too late for the movie screen.

And Marian stands in the open doorway as though she’s on fire with the flames behind her, watching him, and she says, “I’m not going anywhere, Willard. Where in the world did you get that idea?”

Sand

When Lee was a boy he dreamed of living in the desert, a student of sand, the protege of a Bedouin camel driver, learning from a master how to find his way through endless miles of dunes with no landmarks because the landscape keeps shifting and reinventing itself. Lee would lie in his bed with a flashlight late into the night and look at the soft, hand-coloured photographs in Lester’s old books—pictures of smiling nomad wives in front of their tents wearing heavy and elaborate jewellery. The caption under one such photograph informed Lee, A Bedouin woman wears a large part of her husband’s capital, and as his wealth increases, so will the number of silver chains supporting coins or charms. He had no idea what that meant. He didn’t know what capital was, unless the word was used as an adjective, as in capital city. He knew all the capital cities of North America.

He would try to talk Astrid into letting him camp out in the sand hills up the road, but she would never agree. He didn’t know why. “You’re not old enough to stay out there alone, pretending to be the Sheik of Araby,” she would tell him, and he would argue that he wouldn’t be alone, Rip would be there too, and Astrid would say, “Yes, but for how long? That old horse has a dinner bell in his head and he’s going to set off for home the second he hears the first ring.” Lee started to say something about hobbles and Astrid nipped that in the bud. “Oh no you don’t,” she said. “You’re going to get yourself in big trouble if you try hobbling a horse and you don’t know what you’re doing. There’ll be none of that nonsense.” And when she told Lester what he had planned, Lester backed her up in his usual laconic way. “Tomfoolery,” he said. He could have said malarkey. That was another word Lester used to put an end to things.

So Lee lay in his bed at night and imagined himself in a homemade tent with its back to the west wind. Lester had a tanned hide in a shed—his father’s first purebred Hereford bull, named Lucky, shipped from Ontario and the foundation of his herd—and Lee planned how he could load Lucky’s hide onto Rip’s back somehow and take it into the sand and then drape it over a frame of fresh-cut poplar boughs, creating a tent that he could leave open on one side, like the ones in the photographs. He’d build a fire in front and cook for himself—beans and cheese (preferably goat cheese but he didn’t know where he would get that)—and he’d have dates from Astrid’s baking supplies for dessert. When the wind came up he would lie under a single blanket inside the tent and listen to the sand battering the hide, and his tent would be sturdy, and Rip would close his eyes and turn his back to the wind just outside the tent and stand still as a statue until the storm was past. Maybe Lee would even find Antoinette out there somewhere and increase his standing, as Lester’s book said, by the animals he possessed. Capital. Maybe that’s what capital was.

Once Lee hit puberty, his interest in Lester’s obsolete books waned, and eventually he quit looking at them altogether. While other kids outgrew Saturday morning television, Lee outgrew the naive descriptions of a simple nomadic life with a small herd of animals and a wife laden with charms. He couldn’t picture himself any more as a hospitable nomad draped in layers of flowing garments, who invited strangers into his tent and served tea from a Persian samovar. And one day he looked in Lester’s shed and Lucky’s hide was gone—he supposed Lester had thrown it out, taken it to the dump—and then Rip and Tom died, and Lee discovered Saturday night and the joy of back roads in a car driven by someone a few years older until he was old enough himself to be the driver, a case of beer on the floor, thinking about girls from the next town but never doing much about it because he was too shy. Even though a couple of the girls tried to snap him up. Whenever they phoned he told Astrid to say he would call them back, but he never did—except for that one girl who was serious and smart and couldn’t wait to get to the city. Then after grade twelve graduation, full-time farming with Lester, all the work of the different seasons, and Lee tried to be an able hand and learn the job well, and then Lester died when Lee was twenty-two, and then Astrid.

And now, here he is, the sole owner of their capital. His capital.

He stretches out on one of Astrid’s webbed plastic lounge chairs in the yard. A wind has come up—the old trees are creaking—and the air feels good. He’s wearing a pair of worn grey sweatpants pulled up to his knees so the breeze can cool the saddle burns on his calves. Cracker is lying in the grass beside him, no unusual sounds keeping him alert and awake tonight. Lee is envious of the dog’s ability to sleep.

He closes his eyes, but it’s no use. He can’t stop the sand from passing. The same sand, he keeps thinking, that was there when the Perry cowboys rode the hundred miles, just blown around and rearranged the way he’d shuffled and rearranged the postcards earlier. And then the postcards are in his mind again, the certainty that the messages are from his mother, the handwriting not quite a picture of her face, but evidence of her existence. He thinks of the box in the closet and is satisfied now with its place there, even though Astrid had wanted it burned. He feels as though the postcards belong in the house, since the words written on them were spoken aloud and recited time and time again until they were part of the walls. He wonders whether their discovery will cause him to ask new questions, but for now he’s content that one question has been answered. Did she, his mother, ever think about him once she’d placed him in Astrid and Lester’s porch and driven away into the night? Yes. She had.

Lee drops the back of the webbed lounger down farther so that he’s lying almost flat. He wishes he’d brought a pillow outside with him. He longs for sleep but it won’t come. Instead, the day replays itself over and over: the miles horseback, the heat of the sun, Mrs. Bulin in his kitchen, the postcards. And always the sand passing beneath the horse’s hooves.

He recalls again how he’d never been able to talk Astrid into letting him sleep in the sand hills overnight. He thinks, I could now, why not? He’s on his own, the master of this spread—surprisingly, the idea of that does not scare him at this moment. He gets up from the chair, pulling down his pant legs, and goes into the house and down to the basement, where there’s an old nylon pup tent packed away, purchased for a school camping trip. He finds a lightweight sleeping bag, not that he’ll need a sleeping bag on such a warm summer night.

Already thinking about what else he should take with him—a bit of firewood, water, an old pot for coffee—but the list gets too long and makes the whole venture seem like too much trouble. He settles on just the tent and a blanket and a flashlight, and his desert scrapbook, kept in a drawer in his childhood desk. He’ll look through it one last time and then put it away forever, maybe in Astrid’s closet. As he’s going out the door he decides that a hot drink would be good after all, so he takes the time to boil the kettle and make tea, which he puts in a beat-up metal travel mug from the Oasis, a poor excuse for a samovar but there’s only him and he doesn’t have to bestow hospitality on himself. He thinks briefly about riding the horse into the dunes again, but immediately dismisses that idea because the thought of getting back on is much too painful.

When he gets outside, Cracker is at the doorstep, wagging his tail, ready again for whatever might unfold. Normally, Lee would leave him behind but this time he says, “What the hell,” and motions for Cracker to jump in the truck box, then he changes his mind again and lets him ride in the cab, which Lester would never have done. He takes a loop through the yard so he can check on the horse. The truck’s headlights shine on the grey coat and the horse barely lifts his head. He’s standing up against the side of the barn, relaxed, resting one hind foot, the breeze keeping the mosquitoes away.

As Lee leaves the yard, a gust of wind hits the side of the truck and he wonders if maybe something is moving in. He drives north, the lights of Juliet in the rear-view mirror, heading once again for the big dunes up near Lindstroms’ and the Hundred Mile School. He rolls down the window so he can feel the night air, and watches the dark shapes pass: the familiar rolling landscape, the cemetery, the bins and sheds and farm machinery, and rows of fence posts and telephone poles. A white-tailed deer jumps out of the ditch onto the road in front of him and he has to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting her, but she flashes off to the east while Cracker struggles to keep his balance on the seat.

Lee parks the truck across the road from the old school. With the rolled-up tent and its poles and pegs in a nylon bag under one arm, his blanket and the scrapbook under the other, and the travel mug and flashlight in his two hands, he sets off across the sand, Cracker sticking close to his side in this new territory.

Lee doesn’t go far. Walking in the sand is difficult and he’s packing his gear awkwardly. As soon as he’s at the foot of a dune, he drops everything in the sand. The pages of the scrapbook rustle and flap in the wind as he unpacks the nylon tent. He pieces together the cross-poles and threads them through, and the breeze fills the tent like a sail, the gusts threatening to carry it off. He tries to stake it down but the pegs are useless in the sand. The only thing to do is sit inside and use his body weight on the floor to hold it in place. He manages to get it set with the door facing east and throws his blanket and the scrapbook and flashlight inside. Then he crawls in himself with his travel mug and ties the door open. He spreads the blanket out and sits on it just inside the door. Cracker sits in the sand staring at him and Lee says, “You stay put there, no wandering off,” and Cracker immediately lies in the sand with his head on his paws so close to the tent he’s almost inside. Lee takes a sip of tea and feels sand all along the rim of the plastic lid.

He opens the scrapbook and sees photographs cut from old magazines and brochures, captions written in a boy’s earnest hand. He knows it’s his own handwriting, but he feels as if he’s looking at the work of another boy, a stranger, although one he wouldn’t mind knowing. The school glue he used on the clippings has dried and cracked, and as he shines the flashlight on an aerial photograph of an oasis in Morocco, a gust of wind grabs it from the page and carries it out into the night. He slides the scrapbook closer to the door, flips the page and watches the wind take a map of the Sahara. Another page and a marketplace in Cairo flies away. As he turns the pages, one picture after another is caught by the wind.

Lee closes the scrapbook. Its demise is no real loss, and then he wonders if maybe that’s what Lester and Astrid had concluded when they spoke about the watch behind closed doors: no loss, just a keepsake, nothing on which life and death rest. He sets the scrapbook outside the tent. The pages flap and paper blows off into the darkness. Then the whole scrapbook slides across the sand until it’s out of range of the flashlight beam.

Lee brushes the grit away from the rim of his cup and sips his tea. The wind is getting stronger. He shines the flashlight beam outside again and he can see fine, loose sand drifting from west to east along the surface. He leans out the tent door, aims the beam in a half-circle around the opening, and he can see that the whole surface is drifting, beginning to lift. A veil of sand hovers a few inches above the ground. A gust hits the back of the tent and the veil rises into a cloud. Cracker whines and inches forward until his front paws are inside and his nose is on Lee’s blanket. Lee slides back into the tent and sets the flashlight in the doorway with its beam outward, so he can watch the drifting sand. Wind gusts under the edges of the tent and causes the floor to lift around the weight of Lee’s body. He can hear sand hitting the taut nylon.

He remembers a poem about sand from high school: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” and then the irony of the words referring to a lost and buried empire. He’d been captivated by that poem—its setting in the desert, its meaning unmistakable—but it strikes him that he and his classmates studied it without thinking about the sand in their own backyard, or the inevitable end of their own empires. As much as he’d liked the poem, he hadn’t thought it was especially significant. In general, that’s what he thought about school. Although he’d been a good student, never wanting to let Astrid down, he’d had no desire for higher education. When he passed on the scholarship, he’d worried that Astrid and Lester would think he’d done so just to help them on the farm. That hadn’t been the case.

He lies on top of the blanket and listens. He tries to hear himself breathing, but he can’t. It’s too noisy with the wind blowing and the nylon flapping. Periodically, something larger than a grain of sand slaps up against the side of the tent and he wonders what it is. He imagines things blowing around outside—clumps of tumbleweed, empty cigarette packs, plastic water bottles. The wind exposing objects from the past. A deerskin pouch, perhaps. The dipper from a water pail. A worn leather boot cracked and missing the lace, a coffee can blown from the windowsill of a one-room shack.

And a camel bone, polished smooth and white by the wind and sand. Antoinette. He wonders what happened to Antoinette. Maybe Willard knew and never told him.

He retrieves the flashlight from the door of the tent and lies back down and shines it on his own chest, rising and falling, then switches it off. He listens for the hoof beats over the noise of the wind, but he knows they won’t come. He waits for the voices of Astrid and Lester—get yourself a good map . . . use the silver tea service—but their words don’t come either. Maybe they won’t ever come again. He has a map, drawn carefully for him by Lester, as assuring as any map can be. And he’d offered Mrs. Bulin a cup of tea tonight, hadn’t he. He’d used her well enough.

He closes his eyes and listens to the wind, the flapping of nylon, sand against the tent walls. As sleep finally comes, he thinks, The very same sand that has been in these hills for centuries.

The wind blows until dawn, releasing the past, howling at the boundaries of the present.

The land forever changing shape.

To the east, the pale pink of early morning.