Kanata (52 page)

1

C
OCHRANE,
A
LBERTA

The montane forest swayed lightly, the air cool before the first snow. Autumn was aloof here; summer could turn to winter in an afternoon. The light was brittle and flattering. Starlings hounded a crow in swirling aerobatics, chasing it away from their nest. As a boy Michael remembered running past a nest and then turning to see a starling only a foot behind his head, motionless, gliding, escorting him out of her territory with extraordinary ferocity. The image was otherworldly and gave him nightmares. A week later he returned with a gun and fired into the nest, his sense of vindication immediately replaced by nausea as he observed the broken nest and tiny bird on the ground.

His mother's house was slouching toward ruin. The rotting roof had been repaired, but the porch was collapsing, and the wallpaper in the dining room was water-stained, the rust-coloured marks blooming within the baroque pattern. Michael had finally torn the barn down. It had become dangerous, listing to the east after a century of powerful west winds, its boards grey and desiccated. Tree roots bubbled up, heaving the stone walkway and attacking the foundation, probing for weakness. A root had come through the basement wall, the bricks helpless against its progress.

There was a marker over the graves of the two dogs, who had died within weeks of one another, like an old married couple. The dog that his father had morbidly named Erebus walked off in January and dug a hollow in the snow at the base of a pine. Michael had tracked him and found him curled up, gone there to die. He was worried that the dog would be helpless, near death, when the magpies descended on him, going for his eyes, or the coyotes would quietly tear him up. He picked him up and carried him back to the house, where he moped forlornly. Two days later, Erebus went back out to the pine, intent on dying. Stanford got the .22 and Michael burst into tears when he heard the shot. They put Erebus in a wooden crate that had once shipped English linens, nailed it shut, and left him on the porch until spring when the ground loosened up enough to bury him.

Inside the house, childhood smells drifted with mnemonic authority; the homemade glue they used to build crude wooden models, the smell of smoke on their clothing that hung over the chair, every compound used to make the house, the newspaper and sawdust that had been used for insulation. Missing was the faint medicinal tang of gin soaking through his father. It left a vapour trail like a jet,
concentrated where he stood and dissipating behind him as he moved uncertainly through the rooms.

Upstairs, what had been his and Stanford's room was largely unchanged from sixty years ago, a clandestine world of damaged lead soldiers, painted and named and sent out to die in new ways each day. Two boys shooting at magpies with bows made from saplings and scavenged Blood arrowheads, inventing Saracen armies they gallantly slew, pissing off a cliff beneath the moon, passing on the received wisdom of what lurked between Betsy Harrison's legs. Homemade weapons to be used against enemies manufactured in the dark as they lay in their beds: spears hardened by flame, buck knives, spurs. There was the deer-hide map that Michael had made, showing troop movements in the first war. On the dresser was a photograph of Stanford in his uniform, his face expressionless. In that neutral stare the collected rage of five generations or the warrior spirit incarnate or the weakness in their father's blood, their mother's sorrow: a weapon passed down through the ages.

His mother described the ghosts during his last visit. Crowfoot came sometimes, she said, though he never spoke. His lean face, that aquiline nose—like a scythe; he stood near the wolf willow that grew by the creek. Her ghosts were a wide-ranging group, and weren't limited to people she had known. When Michael asked when she had seen the first ghost, he was surprised to learn that it had been more than a decade ago. There had been dozens of sightings over the years, but now they were a fixture, a daily occurrence.

They weren't limited to humans either. She saw buffalo, deer sometimes, and wolves. Horses that had been dead for decades that she remembered by name. She saw the dogs. She wasn't afraid of the ghosts and most days was happy for
their company, though she found it difficult to sleep. She had once seen Michael's sorrowful father, marching the land in his handmade boots.

“I think he was trying to be useful,” she said.

His mother seemed to spend as much time in the spirit realm as the real world. From the upstairs window of his old room, he could see her in the backyard, her small form further diminished by this perspective. She turned and saw him there and he went downstairs to embrace her. She was as dry as a sarcophagus, like desert air. They sat in the parlour, an anachronism with its upright piano, a gift from Dunstan. It had bare spots where the finish had worn away, and the ancient ivory keys were concave. The floralpatterned sofa sagged dangerously, flanked by three hard wooden chairs. The heavy mahogany case with its glassedin shelves that once held delicate porcelain now hosted a collection of feathers and medicine bundles and beadwork. Michael sank into the ancient cushions of the couch and his mother served brackish tea made with the leaf of
Prunella vulgaris
that she bought from a Stoney Indian and believed to be curative. They sipped the awful tea from the exquisite china that Dexter had brought from London seventy years ago, as thin as paper now, with spidery lines, the blue flowers faded.

His mother was ninety-seven, maybe older. There wasn't a reliable record of her birth, born with the nation still humming in the blood of its creators, giving sanctuary to the rude crowd, a sense of possibility conferred by nothing more than space. There were still a few dark streaks in her white hair, and her face, which had grown rounder in age, had now collapsed into a compact ball with lines radiating outward like a medieval street map. For decades she had
seemed ageless, and now she looked like Crowfoot's mother must have looked, a diminutive leathery witness to a rapacious century. She had been getting quieter in the last year or so, her gift for stillness coming to its logical end.

“Do you see any ghosts right now?” Michael asked.

His mother looked out the window, scanning the long grass that stretched toward the mountains. “No,” she said.

“Do you ever see Stanford?”

“I haven't seen him,” she said slowly. She saw her father, Jamieson, on occasion.

Michael had made a doctor's appointment for her but she refused to go. Was this some form of dementia? She was lucid most of the time. It was a miracle that she could still take care of herself, isolated as she was in this house. She had never learned to drive and had refused Michael's offer to move in with him.

“Do
you
ever see Stanford?” she asked.

“He appears in dreams sometimes. We're out riding together, or fishing the Bow.”

In fact, Stanford only appeared in grotesque dreamscapes that occupied ruined forests, corpse-strewn fields, charred, unfamiliar buildings, all of it joined in a grey dream light. He hadn't told her about the letter.

This business with the ghosts didn't concern him that much. Perhaps it was natural: She had lived as a ghost for much of her life; almost weightless as they starved on the march up from Montana, invisible to all who encountered them. With Dexter, she occupied a limbo: one life when they were alone, another in the face of the public. The mother of their two children, she retreated to the role of employee when he had parties, parties that started with aristocratic solemnity and some form of entertainment—polo or
croquet—and degenerated into raucous toasts. There had been duels with rake handles, croquet mallets, and butter knives, ending in farce and nominal blood. At these parties, Catherine served drinks, and when the guests were settled she took him and Stanford for walks in the foothills, identifying wild mint, purple aster, fleabane, and fireweed, investigating fox earths and spotting deer or coyotes. When it got dark, they lay on the cool ground and stared up at the stars as she outlined the constellations and told them stories.

“Do you need anything?” he asked.

“No.”

Michael finished his tea, which tasted bitterly of earth, and briefly thought of repeating his offer of staying with him, but he knew the answer and so didn't bother. He got up and kissed his mother's head. “I'll come by on Thursday,” he said.

2

Michael observed his students, their tired Monday faces. The afternoon sun filled the classroom with a stifling heat. Nancy Baxter ran a pink comb through her lustrous hair, more performance than maintenance, the public rite of the beautiful. Hector Grayson was slumped in his seat, already asleep, his mouth open, saliva pooling on his pearl-button shirt. August Purvue stared out the window. Billy Whitecloud's empty seat.

“What is a map?” Michael asked rhetorically. Almost every question in his class was rhetorical. “A painting. You have the image in your head and you put that image on paper and a world comes to life. Some maps are truths in the service of a lie. Some are simply utilitarian. And some are art.”

They stared at him dutifully, a primitive tribe striving to find meaning in the noises of a missionary, their heads filled
with longing, the lyrics of John and Paul, envy for someone's jeans. Observing one another with scientific rigor and ignoring the larger world. “A map is a lament,” he told them. “You lose something—that sense of possibility, and you gain something: knowledge, which isn't always a joy to possess. Maps were the first blow against Indian reality.”

They now had a tangible history that occupied their interest: what happened to Billy. What had happened in that car? It consumed their imaginations and created a hierarchy of those who knew something, an event in a place where there were so few.

“I want all of you to draw a map of this particular moment in your lives,” he said. “You can map your family, your bad mood, the person to your right, anything.”

They rose out of their wooden seats, the student prisons that had grown too small for many of them, and there was bumping and tipping and scraping as they freed themselves. He could be talking about the Magna Carta or bran muffins or how to die of natural causes. It was all the same to them.

M
ichael drove to the hospital, the sun dropping bright and reddish behind him. Billy was thinner, and looked older; there was less of the boy. A week earlier Michael had come in when Billy's father was visiting, a surprise. Davis Whitecloud's dark mass filled the room like a weather system. His large nose was bent to the side, his hair longish. But it was his hands that were his most distinguishing feature, like dangling machinery, scarred from years of careless use. Cuts ran across scars that intersected with small holes that hadn't closed. Davis was six-foot-six, maybe 270 pounds, and his nickname was FBI, for Fucking Big Indian. Michael had
known people like Davis when he worked in the oil fields, men who sat hunched over their draught beer on Saturday night, a simmering rage inside. And every week they found someone who cradled their own anger like an infant, and in the sickly light of the Cecil Tavern, or the St. Louis, or the King Eddie, they recognized one another, and by the end of the evening there was blood.

When Michael came in, Davis was leaning over his son with a damp cloth, dabbing carefully at his face. Six small lines had been drawn at a slight diagonal, three on each side of his nose, two royal blue stripes separated by a yellow stripe, drawn with a felt pen. War paint. Davis pressed lightly, in soft repetitive movements as the blue began to run, combining with the yellow to produce greenish streaks. The paint moved in tiny rivulets down Billy's unlined cheeks, spilling onto the pillow and settling in small puddles in the hollow of his collarbone. Another trip to the sink to rinse the towel and Davis returned and carefully removed the lines that were left on his son's cheek, the small multihued streams. Michael could see the rage building in him, a rage that would likely find a target on Saturday night. Some man sitting in a Grande Prairie restaurant right now, eating a thirty-two-ounce porterhouse, unaware of what was to come. With a dry corner of the towel Davis dabbed at the water staining Billy's pillow and hospital gown, working carefully, as if restoring a painting.