Kanata (21 page)

The pleasant cloud that the gin brought wasn't enough anymore. It had been, a decade ago, when the ranch was still the semblance of one. He had squandered most of it. The money, the friends even. He supposed he had squandered Catherine too, though she was never his. He hadn't seen his own love creeping up, had failed to recognize the signs. The education he had insisted on, perhaps it was as early as that. The spindly child, first an employee, a colonial responsibility, then becoming something like a daughter. The daughter grew up. And what did she become then? From the age of sixteen it was clear that she was a better judge of horses than he. At twenty she was effectively running the ranch. For two perilously besotted years, a period of drunken fox hunts (substituting the clever coyote), polo matches, summer parties where he sometimes awoke in the damp grass, miraculously uneaten: For those two years he congratulated himself on having hired her, on educating her. He was bursting with nobility. It was when she was in her early twenties that he noticed her light step, the slight, delicate curves beneath the dress. He noticed her skin, its unblemished, copper-hued perfection. The light softened it even more, until her skin seemed liquid, something he could fall into. Those dark eyes that gave up so little. She was keeping the books by then, tending to the horses, buying the cattle. The dogs ran to her. She was the ranch. In his pleasant alcohol dreams she had become a mirage, some shining idea of paradise that moved within the house just out of reach.

And then he touched her. His hand lingered, a kiss. Those few seconds. What was contained in them? On days when Fleming was bedridden, his head an anvil, his limbs aching and useless, swearing off gin, a promise that lasted until the evening, she was the employer and he was the invalid who
had come with the property, an inherited burden. The taste of her, he should have known then certainly. A taste that was elemental, like a dream that one can't quite recall upon waking, a world suddenly vanished that contained every secret. At first it was simply business as usual, an Englishman in the colonies, sampling the local sweets. A national pastime, like cricket. She always withheld a part of herself. His face gluey with effort, out of tricks. He should have seen the signs. Perhaps that was what divided the successful ones from the failures. The successful ones saw the signs, and acted accordingly. He could live with his failure, with his regret, perhaps (though perhaps not), but the longing was too much.

The sun was higher, and would bring a late-summer heat by afternoon. He had walked three miles, he estimated. The mountains were bright and clean looking, polished blue and grey. The breeze was picking up, the gun heavy in his hand. It was a good thing he'd brought the dogs, or that they had brought themselves. They would find their way home and then bring someone out here. It wouldn't come as a surprise, certainly. Still, they would need proof.

MICHAEL MOUNTAIN HORSE

1908

So Macdonald creates a country in his own image. Messy, sprawling: the father of us all. English and French sharing a country. In Europe they wouldn't share a pot of tea. It took a lot to bring those two together, but the Americans were a lot. All that patriotism just across the border, those dark imperial dreams, and finally, those soldiers. At the beginning of the Civil War, in 1861, the Americans had an army of thirteen thousand: reluctant farmers, the indigent, the disturbed. An army like most others. Then suddenly there were two million soldiers hardened in battle. It was a violent time. And larcenous. The Americans stole Florida, California, and Texas and were prepared to take the rest of the continent. Maybe they didn't need to invade Canada. We'd get tired of the stuffy British and want to join the life of the party. We hoped the Americans would destroy themselves through war, but they didn't; it only made them stronger. The four colonies united for protection against this compelling beast, but there still wasn't any real shared nationalism. We knew what we were against but not what we were for.

The hope was that this would come with westward expansion (an old trick). Thompson mapped the West, Macdonald claimed it, but it still had to be filled with people. In that vast empty space was the grandeur of empire. Or so they hoped, anyway.

Michael looked at Billy, a few hairs sprouting from his unblemished face, the hint of manhood. His Indianness, a word Michael had heard in the teacher's lounge, seemed accentuated, the gift of silence now official.

How do you lure the millions to the wilderness? In 1900 Wilfrid Laurier's government sent out a million pamphlets, sunny fraudulent offers of free land, a balmy climate, freedom from persecution. They hoped for British and Americans, and there were some of those, but not enough. Germans and Scandinavians were next on the list. Then, finally, Ukrainians, Doukhobors, Jews, Galicians of every stripe. No one's first choice, but the landscape was so pure, it would change them. They would become clean and Aryan; the winds would scour them, the snows cleanse them, and a Protestant empire would rise up on the plains. What the pamphlets really offered was Christian redemption.

Michael pondered Billy's life. Bathed by the nurse every week, his black hair cut once a month, occasional visits from friends, friends that would stop coming soon, if they hadn't already. The visits from relatives would be less frequent too; his father off working the northern oil fields, his mother worn out. The baths would become cursory; occasionally they'd forget to bathe him. His green gown held the faint generic stains of suffering: leaking wounds or bad food that couldn't be removed even with the hospital's abrasive soap. Without the attention of others, what was he?

It was mostly British and Americans around here. The Ukrainians had gone farther north to farm. The Mormons stayed in the south. Among the local ranchers, my mother was a curiosity,
the Indian widow of a British aristocrat whose nickname was Lord Gin. You don't always pick up on the nuances of adults when you're six years old, but you feel something. The men liked my mother. She was beautiful then. The women didn't invite her to join the baking circle or the Theatrical Group, or any of the other clubs they formed to keep rural loneliness at bay.

All the kids in the area went to a one-room schoolhouse just south of here. It's gone now. There were twelve of us, ranch kids who walked or rode to school every day, arriving at different times, an odd crew; the youngest five, the oldest seventeen. My brother, Stanford, and I walked to school each morning. The teacher might have been twenty and she knew that most of us would only need to read well enough to get through an operating manual or a cookbook, to be able to calculate the weight gain of a heifer. She did her best with us.

I was happy to lose myself in books, even then. One day she came over to help me with the letter G, which I had trouble writing. She knelt beside the desk and took my hand in hers and wrote a dozen Gs, breathing in my ear. When she softly let go of my hand and I mechanically produced more Gs, she whispered, “I knew you could do it.” She smelled like soap, like flowers. I was so overwhelmed by her that I burst into tears. After school, Rory, the seventeen-year-old, teased me about it. He kept at it, wiping his eyes, pretending he was crying. Stanford was thirteen then and he told Rory to stop but he wouldn't. Stanford hit him in the face. It surprised everyone, Rory certainly, but I think even Stanford. That punch opened up something inside Stanford, and out spilled the violence that was coiled there. He went after Rory, knocked him down and kept hitting him. It took the teacher and half the class to pull him off. Everyone was screaming. Stanford's face looked like he was somewhere else, as if part of him wasn't there. When it was over, the whole class lay in the grass,
including the teacher, for five minutes, no one saying anything. Then we all went home. Stanford didn't say a word over those three miles.

Once in a while, Stanford and I would sneak out at night hoping something mysterious would happen in the darkness. One night we walked to Rory's ranch, more than five miles away. The sky was clear and we had that energy that comes with doing something illicit. When we got there, we stared down from a small hill and saw two figures in the moonlight. The wind was blowing hard so we couldn't hear anything. We crept around and got as close as we could, maybe thirty yards away. It was Rory and his father. His father was screaming something and he had a gun. Rory was throwing tin plates up in the air—the kind they used to feed the ranch hands—and his father was shooting at them with a pistol. The wind would take the plates and move them on crazy, sudden tangents. They were impossible to hit. Maybe the father was drunk. He was screaming but you couldn't hear what. You could see Rory was scared. A plate came zipping back toward him and we thought Rory's father might shoot his own son by accident. They were out there for half an hour, then the father sat down on the grass and buried his face in his hands and Rory ran away. It was like witnessing a secret but not knowing what it was. I asked Stanford if everyone had secrets like this and he told me they probably did.

Of course, we had our own secret: our father's death. It wasn't a secret for long. It was the kind of story that sustains people in a small community, one that gives them a chance to point to their own work ethic and Christian values and to sit in judgment, saying it was a terrible thing but thinking secretly that it was inevitable. It confirmed that their way of life was God's chosen path. For years Dexter existed like a lesson from the Bible, his story repeated by the righteous.

When you enter history, you don't know it of course. You're born into famine or war or peace and think: This is the world. As you get older you start to piece it together; x led to y, which created z, and z took its toll on all of us.

1

A
LBERTA,
1908

Just to be part of this crowd, with its wary hick yearning. Two boys hiding under the bleachers, shaded from the August sun by five hundred bodies, the town reassembled in orderly rows, waiting to be dazzled. A few shards of sunlight penetrated. Michael Mountain Horse and his brother Stanford stared out onto the bleached infield, its thin coat of dust sitting lightly after twenty-two days without rain. Michael lay on an angled support beam with Stanford standing behind him, sharing a sightline that looked past a woman's ankles (themselves an unspoken entertainment).

The cowboy moved his rope in a sinuous dance, interrupted by twists that sent the circle spinning over his theatrically smiling face. He brought the rope to a vertical
position, creating a doorway that he stepped in and out of, a jig he kept up for a minute, the rope glancing onto the hardtack and sending up sprays of dust. He had leather chaps with silver studs down the sides, boots with red hearts sewn on the front, and a white hat. The wide circle of rope tightened into a smaller, faster, more sinister circle, moving above his head as he walked around the infield until it landed softly, like a living thing, around the budding corpulence of Percy Wedgewood, a Methodist preacher.