Closing his eyes, he rubbed his hand over his chest and thought that if he could just make it to morning, everything would be fine. But then Joe Dakotah's key chain, the silver metal, the buffalo head, swung abruptly across his mind's eye. Instantly, he knew that everything wasn't fine. That things would not be fine again until he could somehow make them that way. If anything happened to this girl, on this land, it would be on his head. He opened his eyes in time to watch her slip back inside the cabin. The door slowly closed. He would have to stay. What other choice did he have? But what would she think of him, parked outside her door like some crazy haunted animal?
He had to stay through this goddamn night and take care of her and watch over her. There was something out there in the darkness. A presence. Maybe it was the land itself. Telling him that he was not welcome.
He concentrated on her, inside the cabin. What did she look like when she slept? Did she sleep on her side or her stomach? He thought about the back of her neck. The small protruding bone. He thought about her breasts. Then he tried not to think about her breasts. They were beautiful. And big. He shivered. And curled up on the seat. And fell asleep thinking about them.
Toward morning the eastern sun rose up over the
lake right beyond his window. Closing his eyes more tightly, he watched the rosy ball of light behind his inner eye elongate, slowly turn a perfect shape. A buffalo head. Same shape and size as the one on Joe Dakotah's key ring. Something small and hard, like a smooth round pebble, shifted inside his chest, and he felt stronger.
After that he went home. He called his boss at Petro-Can. Told him that he wouldn't be in for a few days. He was going to lie about the reason, but Johnson jumped ahead of him.
“Got things to do, eh?” said Mr. Johnson. “Well, I understand. Heard you did real well at your final year. Your stepdad's been bragging about you again. What are your plans?”
Lonny thought about Earl's last letter to his daughter, remembered how it still lay at the bottom of his bedroom drawer, under a layer of thingsâan old plastic comb, his eyeglasses that he hadn't worn in several months because of vanity, two packages of unused guitar strings, a book he'd been meaning to read, the ticket stubs from the Tragically Hip concert that he and Robert and Jen Nightingale drove all the way into Winnipeg to see, a year ago this April.
Also, there was the photo of Mom and Deena and him. It had been taken by Pop the year before Mom died. They were standing on top of Medicine Bluff. Mom and Deena had just been tickling him. It had been, he now recalled, a dazzling sunny day. They were framed by blue sky. They were all laughing with
their mouths open. It was a memory that made time stand still.
He would have to give this girl her letter. It was something he knew he needed to do, a matter of resolve that lay like a small and sickly thing right at the outer edges of his inner vision. But how could he just hand it to her?
“Mr. Johnson,” he said shakily, “I've got some things I've needed to take care of for a long time. That's why I need a few days.”
The truth surprised him. So did Johnson's response, although it shouldn't have. He was a good boss. Kind, friendly, always ready to bend over backward with the work schedules.
“Take all the time you need,” he said. “I can get Keith or Dan or Jen to fill in for you. It's hard, these days, for young people to figure out where they're going. See you,” he said, adding cheerfully, “whenever.”
Lonny grabbed a quick shower and left Pop still asleep. Lately, on his days off, he'd been sleeping in more than usual. Then he pulled out Earl's letter and took it out to the truck. He threw it in the glove compartment and drove back through the fresh morning air to see her.
The wind had died just before dawn, and cradled in a balloon of silence, she had woken up briefly and then fallen back to sleep. When she woke again, the sun was fully up. Birds sang outside the window screens. She wondered if he was still out there and staggered to her feet and went to the kitchen window.
Where his truck had been, tire marks made pathways like memories in the long green-and-golden grass.
She felt a trickle of relief. Then disappointment. Then an overwhelming hollow loneliness. She went over to the kitchen wall and picked up the phone. The only person in the world she wanted to talk to now was Mom. Even if it meant waking her up.
On the second ring her mother picked up the phone. “You're okay? You got there all right? No trouble with the car?”
“I'm fine, Mom. Everything's fine.”
“Everything works?”
“Yes. It's a very small cabin, but everything works.”
The city seemed so far away. How could it be that she had been there only twenty-four hours ago? Something about this place, the way it caught you in its spell, made time seem to stretch. It tricked you. It made you think that
this
was real time: wind time. Leaf time. Grass time. Lake time. Pulse-of-the-earth time.
“I'm glad you left your message on the machine,” her mother was saying, “because then I knew Mr. LaFrenière had taken care of the phone just like I'd asked him to, and here you are.” She hurried on. “So do you like it, this land that Earl⦠your dad left you?”
Alex could hear the little catch in her voice and didn't know what to do with all the guilt that that made her feel. Maybe she should invite her to come out here. Francine could bring them both in her car. No, she thought, I have to get used to being here first. I have to do this on my own without Mom and Auntie Francine loving me to death and driving me nuts with all their good intentions.
“It must be very green there,” Mom continued, sounding very far away.
She breathed deeply, once. Closed her eyes. There were things swimming in the lake. She could vividly see them. Could see movement through deep green. Could see their eyes looking at her.
“Is it a big lake? It looks quite small on the map. But it must be good for swimmingâ”
“Mom,” Alex interrupted, “I'm feeling a bit foggy.
I haven't eaten in a while. Is it okay if I go and have some breakfast?”
“That's fine,” said Mom, sounding hurt and cut off, “I shouldn't be bothering you. I just wanted to know that you were⦠settled.”
“Mom, it's okay. I called
you,
remember? You're not bothering me. Really. It's just all⦠a little overwhelming.”
And now I'm going to cry, she thought, and make her worry, when all I wanted to do was be a strong person.
“Alex?”
She swallowed the damn lump. She set her shoulders. I will not cry, she thought, and then she said, “Yes, I'm still here, Mom.”
“I'm sorry if I'm upsetting you. Try to have a good time. Francine says to tell you that if the loneliness gets too intolerable, you can always come home. Nobody will think the worse of you. You know that, don't you?”
“I know that, Mom. Thank Francine for me anyway. Thank her for the thought.”
“Alex, you sound very funny. You sound very far away.”
“Mom. I'm okay. Really.”
“Well⦠please take care of yourself.”
“I will. I wish you wouldn't worry about me.”
She got off the phone and began to pull milk and orange juice and cheese and eggs out of her father's once-empty fridge. Then she felt nauseated. She put them all back again. Next, she hauled out a loaf of
twelve-grain. She opened the plastic bag, ripped off a corner of bread, looked at it in her hand, thought about eating it, and stuffed it back in the bag.
In the bathroom, she turned on the water taps. Watched the water slowly turn a slightly different color. Not perfect. But better. Peeling down, she got into the shower and stood there for a long time, letting the steamy water beat down on her body. She opened her mouth. The water had a metallic taste. And it was slightly salty. She wondered if it was a taste you could get used to. She stood there for the longest time. Thought about the fact that this water wasn't treated, like city water. It just came up, as it was, from deep in the ground.
After, she pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and socks and boots and went outside, her hair still dripping. Made her way slowly across grasses, their tops flattened by winds. Always winds here. Even when they lowered to a whisper, you could still feel their breath on your skin.
She walked toward the hill and thought about what Mr. LaFrenière had said yesterday about her father: He was a tired man. Then she tried to picture him but failed. A tall gray form with fuzzy edges. A tired man. So why does a tired man buy up all this property in the middle of nowhere, and then hide himself away in a cabin? Did he have strange dreams, too? Did he have waking visions? Did Grandpa come to him in the middle of the night?
She pictured Grandpa's silver spirit hovering a few inches off the floorboards. “Earl,” he whispers to the
lump who is quaking with fear under an old thin blanket, “why did you tease her with those puny letters? You made her want to have a real father. You made her think half her life was missing. Well, it's time to do something about it. Show yourself.” Grandpa reaches out and grabs a tattered end of the withered blanket. He whips it off the bed. Abracadabra, nobody's there.
She turned and quickly walked ahead, legs swishing though a tangle of grasses. She pushed ahead, on up the hill through bush where cobwebs hung, thinly beaded with dew, and thought about Grandpa and Old Raven Man instead. She pulled them close against her inner mind. She felt the comfort of these two old men, walking beside her. They urged her along. Grandpa's red Tansi Lumber cap pulled down over his eyes. Old Raven Man's gentle head, white hair flowing in the wind along the collar of that oh-so-familiar black wool coat. Three buttonholes. One button, the middle one, missing. The other two shiny as a bird's eyes.
Up through deep fragranceâleaf and root and moss. Up to the place where trees rustled. Up past those trees to full sunlight. To the treeless, grassy, mounded top. And there to sink down.
Look around the rim of the prairie land. See what others have seen for thousands of years. Turn your eyes skyward now, to where a small cloud, like a puff of smoke, is making its way to the heavens.
He found her up there on the mound, lying back in the grass. Her long hair fanning out from her skull. Her eyes closed. He knew she would be exactly where he and Pop had sat that first day, when he was seven years old, and the world was a lot less complicated.
He didn't want to startle her. Lowering himself quietly, he sat on his heels and waited.
Her lashes fluttered. With a little gasp, she sat up.
For one fearful second he thought she would run. Or that he would. But neither of them did. He exhaled slowly.
“Where did you come from?” she said, looking all around her.
“Dropped like a hawk out of the sky,” said Lonny with a nervous smile. I'll bet she can see the corners of my mouth twitching, he thought. I'll bet this little old girl sees right through me and all my romantic bullshit.
She had pulled off her boots and socks. He looked sidelong at her feet. They were small and pretty and out of proportion with the rest of her.
“I was here all night,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck, surprised at himself for saying such a thing out loud.
“I know.” She curved back her head, looking curiously at him with those eyes. It was such a look, seeming to enter his soul, dart around, search for a light.
He slid his gaze away and said, “I fell asleep. That's what happened. And then I took off early this morning.” He pulled up a stalk of grass so he would have something to do with his hands. He plunged ahead. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Yes.”
“It gets very dark out here at night.”
“I noticed that.”
“I thought you might be scared your first night here.”
“I wasn't.”
There was pride in her voice. She's lying, he thought. She was probably scared to death, sleeping all alone in dead Earl's cabin. Looking at his feet, at the cabin down the hill, at the lake, at anything but her, he said, “I used to come up here a lot, but things changed. Life. Stuff like that.”
He finally looked at her again and smiled, and smiled her sweet smell, and felt a raw and burning ache slowly rise up his body.
She had a delicate mouth. But she didn't smile back. “So. You and your dad live alone?”
“He's actually my stepdad. My mom died a long time ago.”
“Oh. I'm sorry,” she said with real sympathy.
“Pop and I get along pretty good.”
Her hands were now flat out behind her. She rested on them. Beneath her hands, beneath the earth, who knew what lay there.
“Did you know my dad very well?” She turned her head, her wild eyes, to look him full in the face.
“Not really.” His heart began to pump erratically. “We didn't see him that much. He stuck to himself.”
“I never got to meet him, my dad,” she said, looking away down the long grassy slopes.
Lonny thought about Earl. About the last time he'd seen him alive, the tuneless whistle that had lingered long after the man himself had disappeared into the late afternoon in January. I have to tell her, he thought, I have to tell her about the LaFrenière land. About how unwelcoming it can be. About how my carelessness made it this way.
“A lot of people have died here,” he said, and almost stopped, because it sounded naked and awful all out in the open like that. “This⦠where we're sitting,” he continued, “is called Medicine Bluff. It was, is, a burial mound.”
The breeze clattered through the poplar leaves and in shuddering whispers swept up and away. He pushed past the coldness that prickled at his skin. Squinted
instead at the hot sun. Told her about Pop and him coming up here. Pop's theory. The day he and Robert found the skull. How they flew with it back to Pop and Mom.