The Geomancer's Compass (18 page)

“O
h, no!” I moaned. “No, Brian. Not the homeless guy?”

Brian looked daggers at me, shook his head once, and pressed his index finger to his lips before slashing that same finger across his throat. In other words, “Shut up or I'll kill you.”

So yes, in answer to my question, it was the homeless guy – who, it was now clear, had been camped in the hall outside the room since Brian's return to the hotel. I apple-dolled my face to indicate my displeasure before falling back onto the bed in mute, grumpy submission. As I lay there, staring angrily at the ceiling, I noticed a suspicious yellow stain that looked a lot like Italy. What was it? Had the toilet in the room above had some sort of flushing malfunction? Was it recent?

In the meantime, Brian had turned back to the door and was saying in this really smooth way – you know, the way you
talk to little kids when they won't eat their disgusting squash or try to convince your dog to trade your grandmother's hearing aid for a Milk-Bone – “Come on in, Elijah. No, no problem. Seriously. She's cool.” Back his head pivots, in my direction. “Be cool,” he mouths to me, scowling fiercely to underscore his point.

“I'm cool,” I mouthed back. Might as well be. How long could this – whatever
this
was – take? Get the guy in and out, with a fiver for the favor, and then I could start searching Land Registry for any properties that once belonged to Willard Rawlins.

Elijah's smell preceded him, a rank combination of wood smoke and old sweat, made all the more pungent by the wet-dog smell that Lois contributed to the mix.

Wait a minute – Lois?

I sat up. How had Brian managed to get Lois past the desk clerk? Assuming, of course, that Oscar saw anything wrong with letting homeless people and their mangy pets wander all over his hotel. It wasn't the Ritz, after all.

Elijah appeared in the doorway, looking hesitant, embarrassed, and a little bewildered. He was taller than I would have guessed, almost as tall as Brian. Well, duh; when we had first seen him, he'd been sitting all hunched over but, even standing, he looked stooped, like the upper part of his spine had collapsed in on itself. He must have been a big man once, judging from the broadness of his shoulders and the size of his
feet and hands. Now his clothes – an old navy blue windbreaker pulled over a dirty gray sweatshirt, baggy khaki pants with frayed hems held up with a belt improvised out of rope – hung from him as if from a skeleton.

“What are you waiting for? Come on in. Sit down.” Brian gestured toward the armchair by the window.

“Lois?” Elijah asked uncertainly. He looked over his shoulder. “I don't go nowhere without her.”

“Lois too.” Brian was expansive. “The more the merrier. We like dogs. Don't we, Randi?”

I nodded, cringing a little.
Clean
dogs, I thought, not walking three-ring flea circuses. Just the thought of Lois made me feel itchy. But at least it made me forget about the stain in the ceiling.

“It's just that … sometimes people don't let her … they don't
allow
her,” Elijah explained. “That's why I don't go to the shelter. She's not welcome there. They say I can stay but not Lois, she'll have to go to the Humane Society. I know what happens to dogs at the Humane Society, dogs nobody wants because they're old and broke down and not this type or that type but a Heinz 57. How could I do that to her when she's been with me all these years?”

“No worries, Elijah,” Brian assured him. “Lois is welcome here.”

“Well, OK, then.” Elijah eyed the armchair with its faded upholstery and its shiny seat, then shuffled toward it like a
big old gaunt bear, trailed by the woebegone Lois. Never, I thought, had I seen a more abject-looking animal. Everything about her drooped, and she had these sad, sad eyes. Tragic, really. Because when you think about it, it's got to be super-depressing being a homeless person's dog.

Elijah glanced out the window at the roof of the adjoining building. “Nice view,” he observed. He sat down gingerly, like he didn't trust the chair not to break. (I made a mental note not to ever sit in that chair.) Lois slumped to the floor and flattened herself on the rug at his feet like a furry mud puddle. Elijah rubbed his hands together as if for warmth. “Don't suppose you got one of those minibars, do you?”

“Nope,” replied Brian. “Sorry.”

“Just asking.”

Brian sat on the edge of the bed nearest him. “Elijah,” he said, “I want you to tell Randi what you told me out on the street.”

“OK. Yeah, sure.” Elijah removed his toque. His hair was long, coarse, and the color of iron. He sniffed the toque, then proceeded to knead it as he cast furtive glances around the room, looking nervous and distracted.

We sat there, Brian and I, looking intently at him. After a moment Brian said, “Elijah?”

“Huh?”

“You were going to tell Randi what you told me out on the street. About the golf course.”

“Oh yeah, sure,” said Elijah. “Ahh … remind me.” Definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed.

“You were working for a construction crew …”

“That's right,” said Elijah. “Abbott and Sons. Good job.” He turned to me. “I wasn't always like this, you know? Not so … down and out.”

It was all I could do not to recoil from him. He smelled like old cheese. I gulped and smiled a fake smile, and nodded.

“And there was this golf course development company that wanted to build an eighteen-hole course on the outskirts of town,” Brian continued to prompt him. “Weeping Birches Golf Club.”

“That's right. Weeping Birches. Big Sky Golf Course Development,” said Elijah. “Where Highway 363 heads south going toward Abound and Old Wives Lake.”

I turned to Brian. “What's up with this?”

“Patience, Grasshopper. Go on, Elijah.”

“So Big Sky bought up a whole bunch of land down there, including this one pig farm …”

My heart skipped a beat. I glanced quickly at Brian. He widened his eyes and nodded. “
Pig
farm?” I repeated.

“It was pigs, all right.” Elijah's nose wrinkled and the corners of his mouth turned down in disgust. “Been twenty years, I still remember the stink. Never smelled anything worse in my life.”

And I bet you've smelled some very bad things, I thought. Yourself, for example. “Did the farm belong to the Rawlins family?”

Elijah nodded. “It did. Was Old Man Rawlins who sold it to Big Sky.”

I did the math in my head. Presumably Willard was around The Grandfather's age; if he hadn't died on Vimy Ridge, he would still have been long dead by the time his descendant sold the family farm. “Old Man Rawlins” had probably been his son. Or his grandson, or maybe a nephew or great-nephew. I hadn't yet gone looking for birth announcements in the archives, but Violet and Willard had been married a year before he went off to war; a child might well have been conceived in that year.

“Go on, Elijah,” Brian said. “Tell her what happened next.”

“Well, Big Sky contracted with Abbott and Sons to take down the outbuildings and start leveling the ground.”

“And …?” Brian prompted.

“And that's when we found the grave.”

T
here was a moment of stunned silence. Then, “Omigod,” I cried, bouncing on the bed and clapping my hands. “You're kidding. You've got to be kidding. Really? A grave? You found
a grave
?”

My excitement seemed to take Elijah by surprise. Presumably Brian's reaction to this information had been less over the top. Elijah stared at me, blinked (who was this crazy girl?), then swallowed nervously and muttered, “Yeah. In the wallow.”

“The wallow?” I repeated. “What's a wallow?”

“Where the pigs … you know … where they wallow,” replied Elijah. “Roll around in the mud. Pigs like that. Keeps them cool.”

“And that's where you found the grave? In the wallow?”

“Between the pigsty and the outhouse.”

“Man.” I turned to Brian. “A pig wallow? Between a pigsty and an outhouse? Talk about bad
feng shui
.”

“The worst,” Brian agreed. “If you're thinking what I'm thinking and we're right, Qianfu had every reason to be royally pissed.”

Elijah looked first at Brian, then at me. “What are you talking about? Fang who?”

“Never mind,” Brian assured him. “Go on.”

“Well,” said Elijah, “I took one look at that grave and the way the bones were and I knew they had to belong to one of my ancestors.”

I gave Brian a quizzical look. “
Your
ancestors?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“Assiniboine.”

“Come again?”

“Assiniboine,” Elijah repeated. “We are also called Stoney Sioux.”

“How could you tell they were Assiniboine?” Brian asked.

“In the old days, it was the custom of the Assiniboine to place the bodies of our dead on tree scaffolds with their feet facing west, toward the Darkening Land. When the tree scaffolds got old and broke and birds had picked all the flesh from the bones of our dead, we would bury them in the ground. There was no sign of a coffin in this grave, no shroud or blanket. And it was shallow, like two feet deep. White men do not bury their dead that way. That's how I knew.”

“But that's …” I began. I was going to say, “But that's the way Qianfu would have been buried, just bones dropped into a hole with no ceremony and nothing to say who or what he might have been,” but I thought better of it. Better to play our cards close to our chest. “Go on,” I said.

“The foreman sent us home for the day,” said Elijah. “That's what you have to do when human remains are found. Check with the police, see if anybody's missing. If the grave looks like it might be old, you have to check with the government, maybe the Heritage Department.” Elijah shook his head. “But I didn't trust Abbott and Sons or Big Sky, neither. I thought they might try to cover it up … you know … destroy the evidence, pretend it never happened, maybe slip us some cash so we wouldn't say nothing. The last thing they wanted was a work stoppage. That job was gonna make everybody a lot of money. And I understood that. I did. But I'm Assiniboine. I couldn't just stand by, knowing what I knew, and let my ancestors be disrespected. A burial ground is a sacred place; it should be respected and left untouched. How would you feel if somebody messed with your dead? Ever think of that?”

Brian and I exchanged looks. “Actually, yes,” I said.

“So you understand,” said Elijah.

Oh yes. “What happened next?” I asked.

“I got in my pickup and headed out for the reserve so I could tell the elders.”

“The who?”

“The elders. The tribal elders. At the reserve down at Old Wives Lake.”

“And what did the elders do?” Brian asked.

“They filed a claim on that part of the land, saying it was the site of an ancient Indian burial,” Elijah replied. “You tell it from here,” he muttered to Brian, his voice thickening. “You know. What I told you.”

Brian nodded and, reaching out, squeezed his arm. Ugh. He turned to me. “Everything came to a halt,” Brian told me. “Development was frozen. A couple of years later, Big Sky negotiated a deal with the tribe; money changed hands and Big Sky ended up building their golf course after all, but around the grave. They planted a bunch of berry bushes around what had been the wallow. What kind of bushes, Elijah?”

“Saskatoon bushes,” muttered Elijah.

“They also put up a marker with a plaque, saying it was an ancient Assiniboine burial site. But Elijah here, he's had a pretty hard time because of that grave.” He glanced sympathetically at Elijah, who I was pretty sure was fighting back tears.

“Got sacked,” Elijah said roughly. He shook his head. “Haven't worked since. Word gets out, you know. Nobody hires a whistle-blower. I lost everything. I was making it good in the white man's world. Then I wasn't. Then I was a failure.” He shrugged. “Too ashamed to go back home to the rez, so I stayed here, where I got nothing, where I
am
nothing. And it's gone downhill from there.” Bending down, he stroked the dog's bumpy head intently. She lifted her muzzle and gazed up at him in mute canine devotion. For an instant it was like one of those Hallmark moments, all in soft focus and entitled “Man's Best Friend.” Tears started to my eyes. Don't be ridiculous, I chided myself. Keep it real. You're looking at a wino and a stray, a bum and a mutt, that's all.

Brian glanced over at me. “Got what you need?”

I nodded.

“OK then.” He turned to Elijah. “Hey, Elijah?”

Elijah looked up, blinking. His heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes shone wetly. Brian reached into one of the pockets of his vest, retrieved his wallet, and handed Elijah what looked like a pretty big wad of cash.