Juliet in August (37 page)

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 rested. He sets the scrapbook outside the tent. The pages flap and paper cuttings blow 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 creeps under 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 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 hoofbeats 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.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank those friends and family who gave time to either reading or answering questions: Pat Aldred, Bruce Anderson, Cody Anderson, Travis Anderson, Heather Christensen, Sherry Cuthbert, Connie Gault, Lynda Oliver, Jessica Swaine, Eleanor Taylor, Marlis Wesseler. Thank you to my agent, Dean Cooke, my Canadian publisher, Phyllis Bruce, and my U.S. publisher, Amy Einhorn, for their efforts on the book's behalf. To the Canada Council for the Arts and the Saskatchewan Arts Board. To the Grolier Society for
Lands and Peoples
; to Percy Bysshe Shelley for “Ozymandias”; to Bob Nolan for “Cool Water.”

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Dianne Warren
is the author of three previous award-winning books of short fiction.
Juliet in August
, her first novel, was published in Canada as
Cool Water
, where it won the prestigious Governor General's award for Fiction in 2010. She lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.