To the south it’s either high, grassy hills or land that falls away for miles, all the way to the U.S. border, and beyond it, to the low purple mountains of Montana. Before she notices it, she’s turned north and climbed even higher — her father never failed to point out that this is the highest place in Canada between the Rocky Mountains and a point in Ontario — to the entrance of Cypress Hills Park. Then he would add proudly, as if he’d had a hand in it, that the glaciers had gone around the hills, instead of covering them as they had all the rest of the landscape.
But the sign jolts her for another reason. She remembers that this
is the turn west to go to Fort Walsh, or if you’re feeling adventurous, even beyond Fort Walsh, through the wilderness of coniferous forest and coulees and rushing streams — she’s maybe twenty-five miles from Barney’s ranch. One day, perhaps, she’ll go there again, but it won’t be for a long, long time.
Instead, she wills herself to remember picnics at Fort Walsh. Whenever relatives visited from other parts of the country, her parents would pack everybody into the car and off they’d go to the fort to give their guests a taste of western Canadian history. Not that Iris recalls much about it herself: the Cypress Hills massacre when drunken American wolfers killed a camp of Indians in the mistaken belief they were the ones who’d stolen the wolfers’ horses; the Mounties’ badly mismanaged but nonetheless courageous, even triumphant, trek from the East that the massacre had finally precipitated, eventually setting up Fort Walsh here in the hills; the 1880s when the buffalo were nearly all gone and the Indians were starving and camped out at the fort in the hope of getting food from the Mounties; Sitting Bull and his people on the run from the Bluecoats after the battle of Little Big Horn, looking for protection and then rations; it even has a graveyard — in the early 1880s it was a good-sized town. She finds that hard to believe: the stockaded fort with its whitewashed buildings never did have to fend off hostile Indian attacks; it’s only a tourist attraction now, with an interpretative centre, costumed guides, and buses to the Farwell and Solomon posts where the massacre took place. Nobody lives there at all, the surrounding countryside is barely inhabited. And it’s miles from anywhere. Resolutely, she whizzes past the entrance, begins the long descent to the plains below.
Eventually she turns west onto the Trans-Canada Highway, crosses the border into Alberta, and at Medicine Hat stops to stretch her legs. She’s been gone from home about three hours; so far the way is familiar; she has made this hundred-and-fifty-mile trip a half-dozen times a year, mostly to shop. Even though she doesn’t yet feel she has really gone anywhere, when she parks in the mall lot and goes inside, people seem to have a different look about them — people whose faces she has been looking at her whole life, whose work she knows as well as
she knows the back of her own hand, whose voices she can hear in her head, are indeed the only voices she knows. Judging by the stetsons and boots they wear, mostly ranchers, their small sons dressed identically to them, their wives with lined faces from their outdoor lives and endless hard work; retired farmers, products of an older world with their fingers thick from work, their faces still darkened from sun and wind; city housewives, nondescript, absorbed in their errands. Yet today all of them look faintly alien. She tries hard to shake this perception and fails. It drives her to sit down on one of the hard plastic chairs in the noisy, falsely bright food court where she sips a cup of flavourless coffee and mulls over this bewildering observation.
At last she decides that it must be because she’s going away, that the lifeline stretched between herself and these people and the farm miles back is stretching thinner and thinner the farther away she goes. A chill runs down her back. Should she turn back? But they’re expecting her at Howard’s, she has said goodbye to everyone, she has promised to find Lannie. She hurries out of the mall, gets back into her car, and heads west on a narrower road.
The countryside between Medicine Hat and Lethbridge is less dramatic; everything is closer together than the first part of her trip, and there are more buildings, more farms, and she knows later on in the season there’ll be more variety in the crops growing in the fields than around her home: besides wheat, sugar beets, corn, potatoes. But this road is busy and, not used to so much traffic, she has to pay attention. She turns on the radio and drives to the accompaniment of country music: Randy Travis with his nasal, mellow voice, k.d. lang who comes from a town north of here.
This is the music of her country, and gazing out at the flat, cultivated landscape with that clean light spilling over it, Iris wonders whether its easy rhythms and nasalized sentiments are the right ones to express this place she calls home. She fiddles with the dial and stops, arrested between two stations by high-pitched, warbling cries that burst in through the ether to fill the car — behind the voices the insistent, hollow boom of drums. Goose bumps rise on her forearms, her hair prickles, a shiver races down her spine. At once unbearably sad and stirring, she recognizes aboriginal people’s wild, thrilling
music. She listens, fascinated, but at a curve in the road the sounds fade out as mysteriously as they came.
She drives on to Fort Macleod and the land opens up again, unfolding lazily on each side of the highway, the mountains sitting like a bank of clouds along the horizon that tilts upwards the farther west she goes. She should be getting tired, she has been on the road a long time, but apart from being ravenous, she is in no hurry to arrive at her destination. She finds there’s an odd solace in driving alone like this, as if for the time being her grief and troubles were held in abeyance. And the countryside is so wide open, so visually stunning in its vastness, and so empty of people, although the signs of their presence are everywhere in the herds of cattle she sees spread out in the fields, and all the cultivated land.
She parks on a side street, goes into a café, finds a table, and sits down. It’s just like the café in Chinook, chrome tables and chairs, the floor dirty with dried mud from the men’s boots, it even smells the same — french fries, onions, beef. Half the tables are occupied, mostly by men in jeans, jean jackets, and ball caps, although there are a couple of stetsons too. The men all turned to look at Iris when she walked in, but she expected that; she’s a stranger here after all.
The waitress is a plump woman her own age, her greying hair pulled back and tucked into place with shiny plastic combs.
“Welcome to the fort,” she says, handing Iris a menu, then snapping out her order pad and pencil from her pocket. Iris remembers there’s a fort here, she thinks it’s one they called in school a “whisky” fort and the Mounties came and shut it down in the last century.
“Oh, Fort Whoop-Up, isn’t it?” she asks, smiling, pleased with herself.
“Nope,” the woman says. “Fort Whoop-Up’s by Lethbridge. This is Fort Macleod. When the Mounties came out here in 18—” she hesitates, “1874, they built this fort. Named it after the head Mountie. Whoop-Up was a whisky fort, not like this one.” Iris stares at her, the menu open in her hand. The waitress grins. “One of my kids is a university student, works at the fort in the summer. There’s lots of history around here. If you came from east, you’ve been driving on the Red Coat Trail. That’s what they call it now.” Seeing
Iris is staring blankly up at her, she says, “The Mounties, you know? This is the trail they followed when they started up in the East. It was quite a trip.” She taps her pencil on her pad and Iris sees she wants to get on with her work.
She says quickly, “A Denver sandwich and coffee, please.” Now she remembers what she’d been told about the Mounties’ trip out here. They’d ridden horses all the way, fed the horses the wrong grass, thinking the greener it was the richer it would be, when out here the best grass was the cured yellow grass — and they’d picked the wrong horses in the first place, they weren’t nearly strong enough. And what else? Half the men couldn’t ride a horse, either. But they came anyway, and did what they’d set out to do — brought law and order — and some of them were so brave, to this day people still tell their stories.
She heads out of Fort Macleod on the road that leads past the fort and soon turns north to run parallel to the jagged row of blue-grey mountains that line the western sky. This is a narrower, quieter road. Carefully, she consults the directions Mary Ann gave her and drives more slowly so as not to miss her turns. At one point two white-tail deer jump across the road in front of the car and Iris has to break hard to avoid hitting them, at the same time marvelling at their grace. At another, spotting movement in the field to one side, she sees a coyote running away from her on a diagonal path, stopping when she does to look back over his shoulder at her. It reminds her that she rarely sees coyotes on her own land any more, although deer still cross it. And antelope. Barney said you never used to see antelope off grassland, but now you do because there’s so little grass left for them to graze. Or was it Luke? Luke, who has always hated her and she didn’t even know it or, believing herself wholly blameless, refused to see it.
At last she spots the tall red-brick posts that support the open iron-grillwork gates she has been looking for. She drives through them and down a quarter-mile of paved asphalt road and stops in the driveway of the ranch where Howard is supposed to be working. The house takes her breath away. It’s huge, three times the size of her own not-so-small frame house, and complicated; she can’t quite make out what’s what for a moment, all these rough stone facings, the gleaming
sheets of slanted glass reflecting only darkness or clouds, and masses of flowers, tulips mostly, red and yellow, blooming everywhere. Behind the house, the grey and mauve mountains, their peaks still snow-covered, rise into a surreal blue sky.
Iris looks but can’t see any way around this mansion to where the actual workings of the ranch should be. She’s about to go on around the circular driveway and back out onto the road in search of another entrance when to the right off the flower-bordered, paved driveway she spots a lane that disappears between two more pillars, stone this time, that are themselves half-hidden by the branches of tall conifers. She knows it will lead to the stables, the hay sheds full of the best timothy hay for the racehorses, the offices, the tack room, and whatever else the breeders and trainers of racehorses require. And it’s where she’s sure she’ll find Howard, about whom Luke always said, “Had a way with horses. Liked ‘em.” High praise, coming from Luke.
The spruces are parting on each side of her car; ahead and to her right sits a small log house. Rows of brilliant pink and white petunias bloom on each side of the sidewalk that leads up to the door of what she guesses will be Howard’s home. Beside it, and straight ahead of her, is a long white stable trimmed with shiny red paint, and to her left, gleaming, white-painted corrals. Behind them, she catches a glimpse of a racetrack. She can hear Barney’s voice:
What a set-up! Must’ve cost millions!
There’s activity in the corrals to the left. She can see heads bobbing, both men’s and a horse, and the horse is whinnying. No, it’s a louder, wilder cry than that, and although she has had little to do with horses, she knows a stallion’s cry when she hears one. She hesitates, unable to decide if she should go there to look for Howard or try his house first. She opts for the house, needing the time it will take her to walk up the sidewalk and knock and wait; then maybe she’ll be ready for him. She parks in front of the house, goes up the few feet of walk between the petunias, and knocks on the dark-stained plank door.
A pretty teenager wearing skintight jeans and a faded, too-tight western shirt unbuttoned to the cleft of her small, high breasts opens the door. Her hair is pale blonde, cut short, but curly. Iris’s
immediate reaction is disapproval — Howard is old enough to be her father. Then she realizes who this is.
“Misty?” she asks. The smell of brewed coffee wafts invitingly around them on the still afternoon air, and a shout echoes from the corrals on Iris’s left.
“Yeah,” the girl says brusquely, leaning against the door frame. She’s wearing a silver and turquoise Navajo bracelet on her wrist and she twists it slowly with her other hand. She’s not welcoming, she’s not even polite.
“I’m Aunt Iris. I’ve come to see your father.”
“Oh, yeah,” she says, as if she’s just remembered Iris is expected. A little taken aback by her rudeness, Iris can detect no hint of Lannie in her sister’s face — Lannie’s fairness, yes, but she hasn’t Lannie’s freckles, and there’s a lushness to her face and body that is the opposite of Iris’s memory of Lannie’s thinness and fragility. She winces inwardly. “Come in,” Misty says, softening. “Dad’s out working with a stud, but he’ll be in soon for coffee. Want some?”
The room is warmly dark, the log walls having darkened with age; she guesses the cabin was built before the turn of the century, probably was once the ranch house itself, and there are only a couple of rag rugs spread out to lighten the plank floor, and an orange-and-red Mexican blanket is thrown over the leather couch. Cowboy artifacts are everywhere: silver pistols mounted on the wall beside hand-forged iron spurs, and a plaited horsehair whip — Barney had one too, bought it or won it from an Indian on the reserve near the Christie ranch — and above that, a tanned diamondback rattler skin is tacked to the wall.
“Have a chair,” Misty says, pointing to the chairs around the round wooden table that’s covered with a brightly flowered plastic tablecloth. She turns back to the stove where a coffeepot hisses softly over a blue flame. Scarred thick brown mugs sit upside down on the table and a jam jar in the centre holds a cluster of spoons. Iris is reminded of the ranch houses Barney took her to before they were married: the wagon wheel chandeliers, the stiff furled ropes hanging among the coats by the door, and the rows of battered cowboy boots; at the brandings, the neighbours’ brands cut into the piecrusts. Misty
fills a mug for her, a few grounds spewing out with the still bubbling, smoky liquid.