Knucklehead & Other Stories
knucklehead & other stories
Knucklehead &
Other Stories
W. Mark Giles
ANVIL PRESS | VANCOUVER
Knucklehead & Other Stories
Copyright © 2003 by W. Mark Giles
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages in reviews. Any request for photocopying or other reprographic copying of any part of this book must be directed in writing to Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Giles, W. Mark
   Knucklehead, and other stories / W. Mark Giles.
   ISBN 1-895636-50-7
   I. Title.
PS8563.I4763K58 2003Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C813'.6Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C2003-910173-8
PR9199.4.G54K58 2003
Printed and bound in Canada
Cover by Rayola Graphic Design
Typesetting by HeimatHouse
Represented in Canada by the Literary Press Group
Distributed by the University of Toronto Press
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the B.C. Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (
BPIDP
) for their support of our publishing program.
Anvil Press
6 West 17th Avenue
Vancouver, B.C. V5Y 1Z4 CANADA
www.anvilpress.com
For Secord
Acknowledgements
I offer my deepest gratitude to my partner Donna Sharpe, who anchors me to the world. And to my daughter Lucy Piper, who teaches me something new every day about how we shape the world with language and story. I love you (both) madly.
I am forever grateful to Fred Stenson of the Banff Centre's Wired Writing Program and Aritha van Herk at the University of Calgary: their expert, incisive, and unfailingly accurate guidance made these stories into a book. I owe many thanks to my English 598 peers at the University of Calgary for their readings, insight, and support. Reverend Aurelian Giles gave me counsel that allowed me to seek permission from myself not to write for some years; Edna Alford at two different times gave me the encouragement to continue. Thanks too to Carol Holmes and the staff at the Banff Centre Writing and Publishing Program for their dedication to nurturing a space for creative work.
I have benefited from those in writing groups who have been my patient first readers â thank you especially to Belle Auld, Ross Deegan, and Pat Hastings. For his unflagging belief in my writing, I thank Ameen Merchant. For affirming my faith that people read, I thank my book discussion group: Bob Banks, Tim Breitkreutz, Debbie Brooks, and Annette De Jong.
Many thanks to Brian Kaufman and Jenn Farrell at Anvil Press, whose unflagging work, attention to detail, and passion for publishing have transformed the imaginary into the material book you hold in your hands.
Versions of some of these stories have appeared previously: “K,” “Tears of the Waiter Soup,” and excerpts from “Fugue for Solo Cello and Barking Dogs” in
subTerrain
; “Remission” in
The Antigonish Review
; “Cigarettes” and “Al's Book of the Dead” in
Canadian Fiction Magazine
; “Industrial Accidents,” “The Man in the CAT Hat,” and “Towards a Semiosis of Two-headed Dog” in
The New Quarterly
; “The Day the Buffalo Came” in
NeWest Review
; “Sweetwater” in
The Malahat Review
; “Thanksgiving” in
blue buffalo
; “Wrestlemania” in
Grain.
CONTENTS
Fugue for Solo Cello and Barking Dogs
Towards a Semiosis of Two-headed Dog
The boy in the field. Is he tow-headed? Carrot-topped? Freckled? Olive-skinned? Cow-eyed? Wall-eyed? One-eyed? Is the boy white? A possibility: the boy lies on his back in a fallow field beyond the edge of town. Perhaps he chews kernels of raw wheat into prairie gum. Scudding clouds hypothesize representational shapes. On a distant ridge, a question-mark of smoke smudges the sky with the lingering threat of a grass fire. The sun may burn, yellow-eyed, edging towards one horizon or another. Imagine the boy's pockets full of potash.
A hired man takes a break from the toil of twisting an auger to dig a hole for a gate post. He pulls his hat from his head, wipes his brow with a forearm. He walks and fetches the canteen full of water, covered in wet burlap and hung on the outside rearview mirror of his truck. After drinking three long draughts, he soaks his hat. He settles the canteen into the crook of his neck, and rests his cheek against it.
At night, under the patchwork frenzy quilted by grandmother's arthritic fingers, the boy curls around a pillow. Transistor radio held tight to his ear, he listens to hillbilly music from a station in North Carolina. In an abandoned farmhouse in the fallow field, hundreds, thousands of bluebottle flies lie dead on the floor. He catches a garter snake, keeps it in a mason jar covered with a burlap remnant until it escapes. At the shore of the lakeâmore slough than lakeâevery flat rock is potentially an arrowhead. The boy turns each one in his hands, then skips it across the water. What does potash look like?
The hired man takes a cigarette from a tin box he keeps in his pocket. He dangles it from the corner of his mouth, where a cigarette always dangles, so that his left eye has a permanent squint from closing against the smoke. He cups his hand around the Zippo and flicks the flint wheel. Squatting in the scant shade of the truck, he takes deep inhalations of tobacco smoke. He thinks about his children: “Just stepping out for a deck of smokes.” How old would the boy be now?
Rodeo bulls bursting through the gate, smashing fences, stampeding the crowd. The boy buys Coca-Cola in a six-ounce bottle. He tucks the green glass into the crook between cheek and shoulder, the way his dad used to do with stubby brown bottles of Bohemian Maid.
The hired man hauls himself to his feet and plucks the cigarette from his mouth. He flicks it aside and the wind carries the glowing butt into the tall grass. He grips the handles of the auger and bends his back to the dig.
Father has gone to Saskatoon to work in the potash mine. Standing between rows of ripening corn, the boy stares down between his feet into the dark earth, a mile down through topsoil, the clay mantle, granite bedrock, through underground rivers teeming with blind pale fish, through layers of rock flowing in the push of earth lifting the fossilized dinosaurs in their tide, he stares down into the earth, searching, searching, searching for potash.
âI like it here, she said to her lemon tree. In the bright light of the morning sun, in the cosy kitchen away from the outside cold, the lemon tree seemed happy to agree: I'm glad you like it here. Joanne cupped a palm under each leaf and cleaned it with a damp cloth. The lemon tree flourished, it sprouted deep green, luxuriant, shiny leaves. Joanne didn't wash the new ones.