Cool Water (39 page)

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.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Pat Aldred, Bruce Anderson, Cody Anderson, Travis Anderson, Heather Christensen, Sherry Cuthbert, Connie Gault, Lynda Oliver, Jessica Swaine, Eleanor Taylor, Marlis Wesseler. To my agent, Dean Cooke, and my editor, Phyllis Bruce, for their astute comments and effort on the book's behalf. To the Canada Council for the Arts and the Saskatchewan Arts Board. To the Grolier Society for excerpts from
Lands and Peoples
(published 1929); to Percy Bysshe Shelley for “Ozymandias”; to Bob Nolan for “Cool Water.”