Silence. It draped over everything. When the kid finally allowed a breath the world kicked into gear all around him and he heard the croak of a raven in the trees and the splash of a fish in the ripple of rapids at the creek. He slumped. He closed his eyes and drew deep draughts of air until he could taste it again. Then he turned and walked back to the copse of birch.
The horse was still spooked and shied at his approach. The smell of the bear remained sharp and sour on the wind. He stood and spoke to the mare and rubbed her and when she calmed he stepped around her and walked to where his father lay on his belly. He groaned when the kid eased him onto his back.
“You don’t look too good” he said.
“Feel booze sick,” Eldon said. “And a godawful lotta pain.”
The kid rose and got the medicine sack Becka had given him. There were four glass jars of liquid. He lifted one out.
The medicine looked mossy and slick against the glass and when he opened it the smell was fungal, peaty with rot. He held his father’s head in his palm and held the jar to his lips.
“What’s this?” Eldon asked.
“Becka stuff. She said it’d help you when it counted.”
“Counts now.”
“Okay then.”
He drank a few gulps. His face twisted but he held it down. “Tastes like shit,” he said, wiping at his mouth.
“Figure you choked back worse in your time.”
“Some. Not like this. It’s like drinking swamp.”
“We’ll rest here. If ya can’t ride no more I’ll make camp.”
His father put his head back against the trunk of the birch and closed his eyes. The kid could hear him moan.
“Tell me if I can do anything,” he said.
“What’s in this stuff?” Eldon asked.
“Can’t know. Becka called it medicine.”
“Heats up the belly. Get kinda light in the head too. Kinda woozy.”
“That’s good then.”
“Yeah. Don’t feel no booze sick no more. Just kinda like a head fulla cotton. Ask you somethin’?”
“Go on.”
“How’d ya know what to do?”
The kid shrugged. “Out here you do what ya need to do when ya need to do it is all.”
“Still, that was a fuckin’ grizzly.”
“Juvenile. Not full grown. Likely confused the hell outta him.”
“Took some balls is all I’m sayin’.”
“Seems to me that everything takes nuts.”
“The old man teach ya to move through fear?”
The kid sat and crossed his legs. He peeled a twig off the birch and picked at his teeth with it. There was a stiffer breeze now and the trees swayed and creaked. When he raised his head to look at his father, his father had a grave, sombre look. He considered his words before he spoke. “Can’t no one bring ya to that. Some things you just gotta get to on yer own.”
His father stared at him passively. There was a droop to his head and it slipped down in a hard nod but he lifted it back up and stared at the kid again. “Medicine, huh?” he slurred.
“Yeah,” the kid said.
“Works good,” his father said. His eyes closed and his head dropped sideways and the kid reached over and straightened it and laid it back against the birch. He kept a hand to his cheek. It was warm and flushed but less hot to the touch than it had been at first light. He kept it there. Then he rose and began to make camp.
It was late afternoon when his father woke. The kid had the camp set, and there was a fire of birch logs that threw great heat and his father rolled onto his side to face it. His eyes were clearer. He seemed calm, and when he lifted a hand to his face to wipe the sleep away there was no shake to it and he held it out in front of him and stared at it. The kid handed him a cup of water and he drank thirstily. Then he lay on his back again and stared at the sky through the limbs of the birch.
“The old man told me that everything we need is out here. Trick is learnin’ how to find it and use it.”
“You savvy?”
“Some. I can treat a cut. But I could never doctor nobody.”
“You figure on maybe tryin’ to get to learn it.”
“Don’t know what I figure,” the kid said. “All’s I know most times is how to shake out what’s in front of me.”
“That’s lots sometimes.”
The kid rose and strode into the trees and returned with an armload of wood. He set a few pieces on the blaze and they watched as it took and the heat surged out again. His father moaned. “How you doin’?” he asked.
“Not worth a shit, really.”
“Could you eat?”
“Don’t reckon.”
“You want some of that hooch?”
Eldon cranked his neck and scrunched his eyes tight trying to settle on the spruce boughs the kid had laid under him while he slept. “No,” he said.
His father shifted about and stared at the fire. He was quiet a long time. The kid could hear the creek over the snap of the fire and the rustle of the frail breeze in the trees. He waited. When his father spoke again it was in a whisper and he had to lean close to hear him. “Gotta shake out what’s in front of me,” he said.
“Amen,” the kid said.
“Do me a favour?”
“Sure.”
“Pour it out. The hooch. Pour it out. Get rid of it.”
“You sure?” the kid asked.
“No. I ain’t. But if it ain’t around I can’t reach for it and I wanna go out clean. Or as least as close as I can. I can get through on that Becka juice.”
“You need some now?”
“Yeah,” his father said. He took the jar the kid held out
and sipped at it. Then he handed it back and settled on the boughs and closed his eyes. The kid could tell when the medicine hit because his father’s breath got deeper and slower. “Tell me a story,” he said dreamily.
“What kinda story?” the kid asked.
“Any kind. Any kind at all.”
He was asleep in minutes while the kid scratched about in the dirt with a stick trying to recall a tale. He sat a long time and watched his father sleep. Then he got up to feed and water the horse and to rinse his face in the creek. When he came back to the fire the sun had sunk below the line of the western ridge and the world was shushed into the purple-grey of early evening and there was only the fire, the trees, and the bent form of his father sleeping. He eased the booze bottles out of the pack. Then he stood with them clutched in his hands, watching his father sleep. He turned and walked slowly to the creek and stood on the smooth stones at the bank holding the bottles, the water silvered in the hushed light.
HE WAS NINE THE FIRST TIME
he and the old man rode horses to the mill town. The old man roused him early and they’d saddled them in the pale yellow dust of the sun. The barn seemingly filled with it. It was late spring and the last of the winter chill hung in the air. The horses were excited and they snorted great clouds of breath and he watched them
billow and fade and when the old man walked his horse to the back door he followed, glad to be out in the flare of morning. They rode across the field and into the trees before the old man spoke.
“He called for ya,” he said. “Got a letter in the post last time I was to town.”
“Eldon?” the kid asked.
“Yeah. Says he wants to see ya. Don’t know why. But we’ll be busy as a bugger in a few weeks and there won’t be no time fer ya to go. Now’s best.”
“Good thing you know where to go.”
“Mill town. Parson’s Gap, she’s called. We never been there. Never had no call for it. Till now, least ways.”
“What does he do there?”
The old man laughed and kicked his horse up to a trot. The kid urged the mare up and they trotted side by side. “He does a lot of things. Kinda sets his own pace through the world. I kinda admire the fact he’s made it this far along.”
“What am I supposed to do when I get there?” the kid asked.
“Visit, I expect.”
“How’s that done?”
The old man snorted. “Damned if I know. I was never much cut out for it. You sit and talk, maybe go fer a walk and talk some more. Always seemed to me to be an occasion for chatter is all.”
They crossed a creek and the old man led the way up a ridge. He relaxed in the saddle and let the horse pick its way and the kid did the same. They rode that way until they had crested the ridge and started down the other side. “What are we gonna visit about?”
“He wants to know ya.”
“We met already.”
“I mean, that he wants to know ya like a father knows a son.”
“And how’s that?”
The old man rubbed at the back of his neck. “Can’t say, really. Me, I was raised to the work. Bustin’ sod, plowin’, handlin’ stock, stone boatin’, that sort of thing when I was smaller’n small. That’s what my dad and I done. Weren’t time for talk. Not much, least ways.
“But now and again we’d fish. Head off to a spot he knew and we’d sit there all day long sometimes and just fish. Every now and then he’d tell me somethin’, about himself, about where he come from, some of his adventures. An’ because they were so rare, I held on to them. Every word. Like I could say ’em back to you right now like they come to me. I guess ya get to know a father like that.”
The old man kicked his horse into a canter. The kid rode easily beside him and they let the horses have their head through the lighter bush and on into the scrub of a mountain meadow.
They made Parson’s Gap by early evening. The Métis friends of the old man helped them bunk down in the barn and when the horses were tended to they ate together. The kid enjoyed their talk. They laughed a lot and the old man seemed in high spirits. The food was good and hearty and tasted of woodsmoke from the wood burner they used for a stove. He liked it. Later, the old man and he sat on the rail fence and watched the moon rise. They slept beside the stall where the
horses were put. He drifted off with the smell of horse and dung and straw at his nose and he thought he’d never had such a comfortable bed.
In the morning they walked through the town. The kid was fascinated by the knots of people moving along the sidewalks. The town near the farm was smaller, without industry, and most of the people were farm folk who never had much time for town but for supplies, the post, and snatches of gossip at the mercantile. He could smell the mill here. It was everywhere. The high, astringent pinch of it. The town seemed to be encircled by ridges, the flanks of them dimpled with thin trees, and the rockface was grey, veined, with running splotches of dull orange where iron talus had spilled. The sky was a cap of grey. Where the streets slid down to the river, the houses were bigger, older, sturdier, and he liked the set of them, proud like roosters, with wide sidewalks and sculpted trim. The verandahs looked perfect for sitting.
“Does he live in one of these?” the kid asked.
“Not likely,” the old man said. “Got me a street number here on the envelope. Said it’s closer to the mill.”
The land flattened out into a wide flood plain. The mill stood at the far end, sullen, industrial, dirty, and the clang and rumble of it hurt his ears. The houses were smaller here, unkempt, and there were skeleton frames of old cars and trucks strewn in yards and empty lots. Dogs slunk by with their heads down and growled at them as they passed. He could smell grease and cabbage and fish and here and there the foul air of untended latrines. Laundry hung out on lines above sullied kids’ toys in yards more dirt than sod. The streets were rough, cracked, with potholes, and the edges of the sidewalks crumbled and the slumped power
lines seemed so low he felt as though he could reach up and touch them. They came to an intersection and the old man peered at the envelope in his hand and then gazed off down the street to their right.
“This is her,” he said. “Stepney Street. Now we got to find number nineteen.”
There was nothing to distinguish the street from the one they turned off of. There were no trees. There were runs of ragged hedges and the occasional hump of flowerbeds laying untilled and grim with withered weeds. Number nineteen was clapboard, whitewashed, with a crumbling chimney and a gate hung by wire to rotted and canted wooden posts that were all that remained of a fence. They walked around it into the yard and they could hear the sounds of yelling and the crash of a bottle against the wall. Then a woman’s voice high in the morning air. “I ain’t cleanin’ that no how.” Another bottle smashed against the wall followed by wild laughter.
“This is her,” the old man said. “Room three.”
There was a small sun porch with a busted sofa where a man slept, his head flung back, gape-mouthed, and he had no teeth. The old man put a hand between the kid’s shoulder blades. They stepped through a door that had once held glass but was now just the frame. The main floor was divided into rooms with a dim hallway marked by peeling wallpaper. A stairway led to the second floor. The first door had no number but the next one had a number two hung upside down and held by a pin. Number three beside it was where the ruckus was coming from. It sounded like wrestling: feet lurching about, the slide and crash of furniture, grunting and moans. The old man knocked.
“Christ, Henry, just bring that fresh hooch in here.”
The old man opened the door. His father and a woman reeled about the room in a parody of dance to static-ridden music from a radio on a table. It was the only piece of furniture that wasn’t spilled over or pushed into a corner. “What this?” the old man asked.
“Foxtrot,” his father said over his shoulder.
“Who’s the kid?” the woman asked. He let her go and she tumbled against the table and the radio crashed to the floor.
“Oh shit,” he said, turning to face them in the open door. “Didn’t expect you.”
“You wrote,” the old man said. He had a hand on the kid’s shoulder.
“Yeah, but I didn’t mean …”
“Mean what? For me to bring him?”
“No. I mean, yeah, just …”
“Just what?”
“Just wasn’t thinkin’ it was gonna be today.”
“Today is a lot diff’rent than other days, you’re sayin’?”
“Well, yeah. I’m paid. I’m just lettin’ off a little steam is all.” He fumbled two chairs upright and slid them over toward the door with a foot. He lost his balance and reeled and bumped into the woman, who was busy trying to right the table. They both fell. They laughed and then he clambered to his feet and stood there rubbing at his head with one hand, eying the kid and the old man and grimacing. “Fuck,” he said. “Shoulda wrote and said when you were gonna get here.”