Читать книгу Medicine Walk - Richard Wagamese - Страница 15

7

“OKAY,” HE SAID. “But I gotta know what the deal is.”

His father sat on the edge of the bed, half dressed and the bony feet of him stuck out between cast-off clothing and junk, stark and pale as dead fish. He was smoking and he held it between the tips of fingers that were yellow brown and quivering. Deirdre sat beside him.

“What deal?” his father asked.

“How do you know you’re getting ready to die?”

“The liver,” he said. “She’s shot. All kinds of crap making its way into my body now.”

“From drinking, I suppose.”

“Yeah.”

He looked at his father sombrely and felt his anger rise. “But you don’t know it’s the end.”

“I feel it coming on now. Some days I’m good for nothing. Today’s one of the good ones. I shake a lot. Sweat then cold. Sometimes both at the same time.”

His father reached under the bed and pulled out a bottle and twisted the cap off and drank. He closed his eyes and breathed out heavy and lay back on the mattress with his head against Deirdre’s thigh. The woman looked at the kid and licked her lips and he could see the struggle for expression in the glassy booziness of her eyes.

“And you think I’m the one knows how to take care of you at the end.” He looked over at the woman. “You know what he’s askin’?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“You all right with it?”

“He’s an Indian.”

“That says it all for you, I suppose.”

“We all got a right to go out the way we want,” she said and smoothed the hair off his father’s brow and traced the lines of his face with one finger. The blue nail polish was chipped and broken and when she raised the hand back up to her own face it trembled and she reached for the bottle in his father’s fist. She drank and regarded the kid.

There were no words in him and he stood and looked at them and pinched his lips together grimly. He raised a hand as if to let it lead him to words but all he could do was curl it into a fist and shake it in the air. Then he turned and walked out the door and slammed it behind him. He strode down the hallway and stopped at the head of the stairs. He wanted fresh air. He wanted the street and the feeling of escape that would come from walking away. He paused and looked around him at the dilapidated ruin of the house. The handrail wobbled in his grip. He closed his eyes and wished for the old man’s counsel and the familiar air of the farm. But all he could hear was the sound of his heart hammering in his chest so that he sat on the stairs and put his head in his hands and rocked slowly back and forth until he felt it pass. Then he stood and turned and put one foot on the stair above. “Damn,” he muttered and walked back to the room.

They were laying on the bed now, his father with a ragged shirt draped over him unbuttoned and hanging off his frame.

“I ain’t packed for this. I’m gonna need some things,” he said. “Rope, snare wire, fishing line, hooks, matches, a hatchet, and one of them folding pick axes and shovel, a pack. The forty I give out was most of what I had.”

“Deirdre,” his father said.

She rolled over on to her side and reached down beside the bed and came up with a cracked old leather bag. She rummaged around in it and brought out a clump of bills. She held it out toward the kid.

“There’s enough there,” she said.

“Jesus,” he shook his head and looked toward his father.

“Bring me back a bottle for now and a few for the trip,” his father said. “It don’t matter much now.”

He looked at the kid and waved him off. The kid buttoned his mackinaw and when he looked up they were both watching him.

“What?” he asked.

“She said you favour me.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Around the eyes and how your mouth sits,” she said and gave a small grin.

The kid let his gaze sweep around the room; the gathering of tools, worn and broken and unused for years. “You sure you’re ready for this? We still ain’t made a move yet.”

“I’m sure.”

He stared at his feet a moment then nodded without looking up. “I’ll bring the horse,” he said.

He strode to the door and swung it open and turned and looked back at them. His father lay with his eyes closed with his cheek against the woman. She was propped up against the wall on three thin pillows, swathed in cheap sheets and a pilled wool blanket. Her hands were reaching down, cradling his face in her palms, and her expression reminded the kid of the Madonna and he stood and watched a moment as a solitary tear slid from one eye and travelled slowly down her face, hung on the cliff of her chin, and then dropped onto his father’s brow. She smoothed it into his skin with one finger and when she looked up at the kid she raised the finger to her mouth and licked it and he nodded solemnly to her and stepped out into the hallway and eased the door closed behind him.

He led the horse up out of the dinginess of the river edge and on through the merchant strip. His father rode sloppily, fighting to find the rhythm of the horse with both hands clutched around the saddle horn. The horse neighed and shook her head around at the rough weight and the kid had to keep a tight hand on the halter. It was mid-morning and the shops were busy with the regular flow of housewives, delivery people, and rural folk in town for supplies. People stopped and stared openly. His father kept his head down, more out of a desire to sit the horse, the kid thought, than any discomfort at the gaze of the townsfolk. The pack was cumbersome and he’d have to reload it once they were out of town and he shrugged and tried to settle it better and each time he did the horse kicked up some. The scrape and rattle of hoofs on the pavement drew more looks and the kid did his best to stay focused on the road. He didn’t like attention. He’d always done his business here quickly, never straying or altering from the list in his mind, never speaking more than what was due and moving as quietly and as efficiently as he did on the trail. Now he kept his eyes straight ahead and pulled firmly on the halter. He felt ashamed, as though everyone knew the nature of his journey, could discern from the look of him that his father would not return, and he kept his eyes on the road and walked.

Once they were beyond the main street the walking was easier and they made better time. Still, the motor traffic unsettled the horse and when she shimmied his father grumbled and cussed and leaned back in the saddle and swayed.

“Just sit the damn horse,” he said.

“Tryin’,” his father said.

“Not hardly.” He found the dim trail that led down from the mountain and once he walked the horse on to it he could feel her relax. There was the crunch and shuttle of gravel under her hoofs and even with the taint of the mill the air was cleaner and the kid inhaled deeply and set his shoulders into the walk up out of the river valley. When the grade sharpened his father leaned forward in the saddle and the kid could smell the fetid breath of him again, all booze and tobacco and a rotted high smell like a dead thing. He turned up his nose at it and pulled the horse harder up the grade. His father grunted at the effort of holding on to the saddle horn. When they crested the ridge and eased out onto the flat the kid was sweating and he stopped the horse and wiped at his brow with the sleeve of his coat. Then he wrestled the pack from his back and reached for the canteen draped off the saddle. While he drank, his father sat upright in the saddle, looking down at the town and the roiling of the mill stacks against the green wall of mountain and the perpendicular push of the sky.

“Lived here a long time,” he said.

“Yeah?” the kid said, sloshing a handful of water across his face.

“I’ll miss it.”

“What’s there to miss?”

“You get known somewhere, it hangs on you.”

The kid leaned the pack against a log and began to sort it out for balance. His father had only brought an extra set of clothes and he’d bought himself a sweater and a pair of dungarees and socks with the money the woman had given him. He settled the clothes in the main compartment and arranged the bush things and the booze in the side pockets. Then he used some of the rope to lash the breakdown pick and shovel and hatchet to the sides. When he was satisfied he lifted the pack with one hand and tried it for heft and balance. It sat right in his hand and he clipped the hasps closed and set it back against the log.

“We got no food,” his father said.

“Don’t need food.”

“Plan on starvin’?”

“Plan on gettin’ us what we need.”

“Don’t got a gun.”

“Don’t need no gun either.”

“You’re the boss, I guess.”

“That’s right.” The kid kicked at the dirt and then took another swig from the canteen. His father hauled a bottle out from inside his coat and tilted it up and drank a few hard swallows then cupped a hand over his mouth and his chest heaved some.

“You wanna be takin’ it easy on that,” the kid said.

“It’s just for the sick. Calms me down.”

“If you can’t sit the damn horse, we ain’t going nowhere.”

He handed the bottle down and the kid stuck it in the pack. When he swung it up onto his back his father nudged the horse with his heels and she stepped forward farther onto the shale and gravel of the flat overlooking the river valley. He leaned forward so his forearms rested on the horn and swept his gaze along the serpentine wind of the river and over the jut of the town before settling on the stained edge of the sullen and downtrodden neighbourhood they’d left that morning. He nodded and raised a hand to it, purse-lipped and solemn.

“Mean that much to you?” the kid asked.

“There’s memories.”

“Seems kinda grim.”

“Yeah. Still.”

“I guess.”

The kid reached for the halter and turned the horse, and his father looked back over his shoulder while they walked to the trees, and when the view winked out he raised his chin and looked up at the sky and sighed so that the kid looked up and studied him. There was a redness in his eyes. He pulled a smoke out of the pack in his pocket and lit up and he swayed some so he pressed with his knees to steady himself and sat deeper in the saddle. The horse nickered. The kid looked forward on the trail and led them deeper into the woods and soon they could no longer hear the logging trucks on the highway and the world became the shadow and dip and roll of alpine country and they walked solemnly without speaking.

He was strong from the farm work and used to the terrain so he walked them along at a brisk pace. By late afternoon when the sun slanted down behind the western peaks and the shadows deepened in the ravine where they walked, they’d covered five or six miles by the kid’s reckoning. They’d been following a stream for the last few hours and the trail was good. It was the top of the free-range land and the summer trek of cattle along the stream had beaten down the brush and tangle and only the scuttle of rocks made the going rough but they were smallish and the horse never complained. They’d stopped twice to water. Both times his father had asked for the bottle and taken a few swallows. He rode slumped in the saddle for the most part and a few times the kid had checked to see if he was still there, slapping at his shin until he’d grunted and shifted his shoulders about. When they came to a place where the stream eddied out into a wide pool with a shelf of flat at its edge the kid pulled the horse up and helped his father down. He sat him on a rock and tended to the horse. Then, while his father smoked, he made a fire ring from shore rocks and gathered twigs from the fall of nearby trees and fashioned a twig bundle and set it in the ring of stones and put a match to it. The bundle flared and burned hot and bright and he added limbs and branches and had a blazing fire in minutes.

“Pretty good trick,” his father said.

He took the fishing line from the pack and tied it to a sapling he propped in the rocks at the shore and he turned stones until he found a grub then baited a hook with it and set the line adrift on the rippling current at the head of the pool. While he was gathering wood for the fire the sapling twitched. The trout was fat and he cleaned it in three quick slices of the hunting knife at his belt and flayed it and pierced it through on a forked stick and stuck it over the fire before rerigging the line and setting it out again. He had another fish in minutes. They ate them right off the sticks, pulling the meat from the skin and flicking the bones into the fire. His father asked for the bottle once he’d eaten, and the kid handed it to him without a word and marched off back into the woods again.

When he returned he had five stout saplings and an armful of spruce boughs. He shaved the saplings and used the strips of bark to bind them into a lean-to frame and piled the spruce boughs on before laying an armful more on the floor of it. Then he piled logs behind the fire so the heat would radiate toward the lean-to and stoked it so it was hot and helped his father into it and sat him down on the spruce boughs. He was weak and his upper arm was thin in the kid’s grip. He groaned and shifted about, trying to get comfortable, and once he’d settled he asked for the bottle again and the kid retrieved it and sat beside him and rolled a smoke.

“Where’d ya learn all this?” his father asked.

“What the old man didn’t teach me I taught myself.”

“Spent a lot of time out here, I guess.”

“Enough.”

“Me, I never did.” He stared at the fire and took a small sip from the bottle then nestled it in the boughs at his feet. “We lived in a tent for the most part when I was a kid. Out here. Places like it. But there weren’t ever time to fish. We worked as soon as we could walk. I toted firewood around on a wagon. Had to scavenge it. Didn’t have no axe. Busted it all up by hand and sold it to the people around us.”

“Oh yeah?” the kid said and prodded at the fire with a stick.

“Indians. Half-breeds. Some whites were with us every now and then. Mostly breeds and Indians though. In the Peace Country. Way up north of here. Our people just followed the work but most places wouldn’t hire a skin or a breed. Not regular, least ways. Get a day here, a day there sometimes, but there was never nothing fixed. So I scavenged wood. It’s all I learned to hunt when I was kid.”

His father shook a smoke out of the pack and lit up and smoked a moment. “Your grandparents were both half-breeds. We weren’t Métis like the French Indians are called. We were just half-breeds. Ojibway. Mixed with Scot. McJibs. That’s what they called us. No one wanted us around. Not the whites. Not the Indians. So your grandparents and them like them just followed the work and tried to make out the best they could. We camped in tents or squatted on scrubland no one wanted or in deserted cabins and sheds and such. Never no proper home.

“When we got to the Peace it was all we could do to survive. Some of the men remembered how to do all the stuff you been doin’ but there weren’t no horses and there weren’t no time to take the chance on bringin’ down a moose or an elk. So they learned how to forget about it. Just hung around the mills waiting for work. Most times it never come.”

The kid stood up and laid some more logs on the fire and stirred the embers around to stoke it higher. It was full dark. The horse stomped her hoofs in the bush behind the lean-to and there was the rustle of a varmint in the underbrush somewhere back of them. The creek was a glimmering silver ribbon and the kid walked over and set four hooks on a long line and baited them and anchored the line to a stone and cast it out into the current. Then he walked out of the fire’s glow and stood on a boulder looking out over the creek and the bush behind it and on up to the ragged break of the mountain against the sky.

“So how come no one thought about just going out onto the land?” he asked without looking at his father.

His father lay on one side, leaning on his forearm and staring at the ground. “You get beat up good enough you don’t breathe right,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. All’s I do know is that I was ten before we made it into a town and then it was learnin’ all about how to make my way through that.”

The kid stepped off the boulder and walked back to squat by the fire. “You paint a sad picture,” he said. “Figure you’re the only one who ever got dealt a lame hand in life?”

“No. That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Sounds like it to me. I got dealt from the bottom of the deck myself, you know.”

“Shit. All’s I’m tryin’ to say is that we never had the time for learnin’ about how to get by out here. None of us did. White man things was what we needed to learn if we was gonna eat regular. Indian stuff just kinda got left behind on accounta we were busy gettin’ by in that world.”

“So I don’t get what we’re doin’ out here then.”

His father raised the bottle and drank slowly. He set it down and scrunched around trying to get comfortable and then lit a smoke and sat staring at the fire for a while. He closed his eyes. The kid could feel him gathering himself, pulling whatever energy he had left from the day up from the depths of him and when he spoke again it was quiet so the kid had to lean forward to hear him.

“I owe,” he said.

“Yeah, I heard that before.”

“I’m tired, Frank.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“That’s the first time you ever called me by my name.”

His father arranged his legs under him clumsily and when he found balance he leaned back and caught himself on one arm and looked at the kid and reached out with his other hand and squeezed his arm. Then he eased back on to the spruce boughs and wrapped his coat around him and closed his eyes. He was asleep in minutes. The kid watched him, studying his face and trying to see beyond what he thought he knew of the man, the history that was etched there, the stories, the travels, and after a while all he could see were gaunt lines and hollows and the sag and fall of skin and muscle and the bone beneath it all. When his father’s breathing deepened the kid draped his mackinaw over him and walked out to check the horse and gather some bigger wood for the fire. In the forest the night sky was aglitter with the icy blue of stars and he stood in the middle of a copse of trees and arched his neck and watched them. Then he stooped and prowled around for wood he wouldn’t need to chop and thought about his father scavenging breakable wood and trundling it about for the few cents it would bring, the potatoes, carrots, or onions it would add to the pot, maybe even a rabbit if he were lucky, and he had an idea of him as a small kid, and when he stood finally with his arms full and made his way back to the camp he understood that he bore more than wood in his arms.