“Thank you, ma’am. My name’s Franklin Starlight. This here’s my dad. Eldon.”
“Becka Charlie,” she said. “Proper name’s Rebecca but no one much latched on to the Ree part. Been Becka all my life.”
“Ma’am.” The kid touched the brim of his hat.
“Becka,” she said.
“All right.”
She set the shotgun down on the rail of the porch and helped him get his father down. Together they walked him into the small cabin. The kid looked around. It was different from the empty, mice-ridden place he’d seen the last time he’d been there. There was one window with three panes smashed out
and covered with thin, scraped hide so the light was yellowish and eerie. The cot was set in the back corner. There was a pair of chairs cut out of blocks of cedar and a rough table made from a sawn log with four crossed saplings for legs. The fireplace was stone and mud with a wide hearth that held a hornet’s nest, a stuffed owl, a bible, and a rattle made of deer hide and antler. Dishes and pots were piled on a board set across a large pail and her clothes were hung on nails in the wall: suspenders, dungarees, wool socks, flannel work shirts, and a rain slicker. She had a broom fashioned out of a length of cedar branch and the floor bore the signs of regular sweeping.
“She’s rough but she holds the warmth of the fire,” Becka said. “I done the roof last summer so she’s dry. Chinked the walls fresh. You’re welcome to make yourself at home.”
They sat his father down on one of the block chairs and Becka tended to the fire. When it was roaring good she set a cast iron tea kettle on a tripod next to the flames. The kid left them to see to the horse.
The mare had already walked to the shed and was eating hay. The kid fetched a pail of water from the well and set it down for her and then stashed the saddle and the blanket on hooks nailed to the shed’s remaining wall. Then he brushed her out. When he was finished he walked around the cabin. There was a privy set fifty feet back in the trees. A rough garden that hadn’t been there on his last visit, with a tangle of plants turned hard brown by frost, sat in a small clearing threatened by a spill of blackberry bush and wild rose. Back of the garden in the shade of a clutch of cedars was a grave marked by a wooden cross. The cross was new.
When he got back to the cabin his father was wrapped in a blanket. The fire blazed a fine yellow. There was a steaming
cup set on the remaining chair and he flopped his coat over the back of it and took the cup in his hands. The heat of the tin felt good on his palms. He inhaled the scent of the tea. Pine gum with a touch of mint. The kind he’d make himself out on the land. It offered more heat and he drank it slowly.
The woman hauled an empty pail over close to the fire. She overturned it and sat on its bottom. Her feet were broad and flat as paddles in the wool socks. She had them pulled up over the bottoms of her faded work pants, and the tails of the coarse shirt hung over her hips and made her look shorter and squatter in the flicker of firelight. The kid thought she looked like a gnome and he grinned at his sally.
“Grin like a gopher, you,” Becka said. “How old are ya?”
“Sixteen,” the kid said. “Be seventeen pretty soon.”
“Big’un.”
“I guess. Never really thought about it.”
“He’s bad, huh?” Becka hooked a thumb at his father, who had nodded off. He was folded in the crude chair like a rag doll.
“His liver’s shot. He ain’t got long.”
“Funny thing about drink,” Becka said. “Comes a time ya gotta drink to stay alive at the same time it’s killin’ ya. Never took to it, me. My father did though.”
“That who’s in the grave yonder?” the kid said.
She turned her head to squint at him. He could feel the force of her studying him. He raised the cup and drank in order to break the look. “Cut right to it, don’t ya?” she said.
“Got raised to speak my piece and to ask direct. Saves a lot of time and wonderin’.”
She snickered. It sounded spooky in the glimmer. “That it does,” she said. “Come from him, that kind of reason?”
“No. I wasn’t raised by him.”
“Well, whoever give that give ya good sense.”
They sat drinking tea. Beyond the crackle of the fire it was quiet. He could hear the wind through the trees. Behind it there was the patter of rain on leaves and limbs and it grew louder as it neared like a wave of surf across the land. When it hit the cabin it spattered and drummed on the roof and Becka laid another log on the fire. His father snored. The kid put a hand to his forehead. It was cooler but clammy still.
“He took some cedar tea?” he asked.
“Drank a whole mug.”
“Works good.”
“She’s an old cure but a good’un.”
“You know cures?”
“Some. My dad was Chilcotin. My mother was Scotch. They both had heads fulla the old ways. I got raised up in it. Held on to a great bunch of it all these years. Never know when it’ll come to serve ya.”
The kid nodded. He drank the last of the tea and set the cup lightly on the floor at his feet. The rain was heavy, falling in sheets he could see when he looked out the single pane of the window. He turned to the fire and stretched his legs out in front of him. The warmth fell over him like a blanket and he was asleep before he knew it.
He woke to the smell of fresh biscuits. The rain had slacked off to a steady patter on the shingles. He was alone in front of the fire that had been banked to an orange mound that threw a steady push of heat into the cabin. He yawned and stretched and when he stood and turned to the table by the
window, his father sat looking at him, his eyes in the firelight glistening like marbles. He was still wrapped in the blanket with a pair of the woman’s wool socks on his feet. He nodded and turned to lean his forearms on the table and watch the woman stirring an iron pot at the opposite end of the table. There was a pan of biscuits beside it.
“Coulda slept for hours,” the kid said. He carried the trunk chair over to the table and sat.
“Shoulda,” Becka said. “I’da kept this warm for ya.”
“Just as well I’m up anyway.”
“She eats better hot, that’s for true.”
“Fetch us that hooch, Frank.”
The kid turned. His father was staring at him. His eyes were empty. His face was haggard and everything seemed to fall downward, held in place by the nub of his chin. “Why’nt you just have some more tea?” the kid asked.
“Why’nt you quit shin-kickin’ me and fetch me that hooch?”
“You done good today is all’s I’m sayin’.”
“Day’s still on.”
The kid shrugged and walked to where he’d set the pack and rustled around for a bottle. He could feel his father’s eyes on him. When he turned with it in his hand his father’s mouth had draped open and his eyes were lit with orange from the fire. He looked like a spectre. He handed him the bottle. His father’s hands shook when he grabbed it and the kid had to twist the cap off for him and pour a slug of it into his cup.
“Can’t let a drunk push you around,” Becka said. “They run with power like that.”
“He ain’t drunk right now,” the kid said.
“He wants to be. It works out to be the same in the end.”
“How do you get to come to call me out?” his father said. There was fight in his voice.
“You’re in my home, that’s how I come to it.”
“This ain’t your home. You’re squattin’ is all.”
“This was my grandfather’s way back when,” Becka said. “It come to my daddy and when I brung him here to die it come to me, you wanna know the truth of it.”
His father could only look at her. He lifted the cup and swallowed what was left of the whisky. “Sorry,” he mumbled.
Becka busied herself with plates and utensils and while she rattled around the kid sat staring out the window at the rain. “Sure could eat,” he said after a while. “I want to thank for you for your kindness.”
“Reason people got a door is welcome,” Becka said. “Besides, I been without company a while now. It’s good to talk to something other than the ravens and the trees.”
She ladled the stew into bowls and slid them down the table toward the kid. He put a bowl in front of his father but all he did was stare at it. The stew was rich and strong with the smell of wild meat and the kid felt the enormity of his hunger. When she’d trundled over a length of wood to sit on and served herself he dug in with his spoon. His father took a biscuit, dipped it into his bowl, and then chewed it slowly. His head was down and he stared at a spot on the table. Becka ate lustily. She bent over her bowl and spooned stew into her mouth with a bite of biscuit. She smacked and gobbled and the kid smiled at her enthusiasm. He threw off decorum too and ate with the energy of his hunger. His father just poked at his food. He slopped whisky into his cup and drank slowly.
He and the woman ate three bowls of the stew apiece and finished off the biscuits. Then Becka served them a cup of
tepid tea and while the kid sipped at his she ladled the last of the stew onto a plate with the remnants of a biscuit. She spooned his father’s bowl onto it and headed for the door.
“Dog?” Eldon asked.
“Usedta have one named Curly but he died. This is for the spirits,” she said.
“Spirits? What kinda witchcraft you practise anyhow?”
She turned at the open door and crooked her head and looked at him. “Ancestors,” she said. “Grandmothers, grandfathers, our people who gone before. The trees, the animals, the birds. Them spirits. If that’s witchcraft to you, I feel sorry for ya.”
“Seems like kinda a waste of good food.”
“Not eatin’ it is a waste of food.”
“I’m sick,” he said.
“Might not be so sick if ya ate.”
“I got no belly for it.”
“Seems to me ya got no belly for a lot of things.”
He managed a dull sneer. Then he tilted the cup and drained it and set it back on the table, eying her hard all the while. She only shook her head and walked out the door.
“She’s tough,” the kid said.
“She’s a bitter old washed-out bitch.”
“Took us in outta the rain.”
“Yeah. So she’d have someone to sermon to.”
“I never heard no sermon. Just someone talkin’ straight.”
“Straight outta the loony bin’s my thinkin’.”
His father fumbled about for a smoke and the kid rolled two from his makings. When he was done he helped his father out the door and onto the porch. There was a bench and a willow sapling chair. He set him in the chair and lit his
smoke and took a seat on the bench just as Becka strode around the corner of the cabin. She sat beside the kid and he felt the bench sag with her weight. She took an old pipe from her pocket and crossed one leg over the other and lit up. The three of them smoked in silence. The rain slapped down and then seemed to break suddenly to become a light shower and down into a fine mist with fog rolling in from the trees.
“She’ll clear off by morning,” Becka said. “Be muddy but you’ll travel all right.”
“The horse is a real mudder,” the kid said. “She’s a mountain horse.”
“Looks like a good mare. Where ya headed?”
“West.”
Becka nodded. She smoked her pipe and levelled her gaze at Eldon, who sat motionless in the willow chair. The smoke billowed around her face. Her gaze was intent and serious and the kid could almost feel her thinking.
“I wouldn’ta expected it from you,” she said.
“What?” His father gave her a bored look and then stared back at the floor of the porch.
“The warrior way,” she said quietly. “Givin’ yourself back to the land. I wouldn’t have thought you had any of that teachin’ in you. That’s what this is, right? He’s takin’ you somewhere west of here so you can get buried in the warrior way?”
The kid was shocked. “How’d you know that?” he asked.
She kept her gaze on his father. “Not hard to figure. He’s on his way out and there’s nothin’ west of here for miles and miles and where there is somethin’ he won’t make it. He don’t savvy spirit talk. So I know he ain’t been schooled in traditional ways. But he’s a sorry sumbuck, that’s plain. So now he figures that goin’ out in some kinda honourable
fashion is gonna fetch him some peace way yonder. ’Cept it ain’t likely to.”
“You read all that in a few hours?”
“Like I said, mister. It ain’t hard to figure.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“I ain’t the one that needs to, I suppose.”
His father looked up at the kid. He wondered if it was an effect of the light but the kid could see him soften. Then he pursed his lips and lowered his head again.
“I could use me more of that fire,” he said finally. He looked square at Becka now. “If you don’t mind I wouldn’t mind to pay back a little of what I owe.”
“I don’t follow,” she said.
He looked at the kid. “For him. I got some story that’s needed telling for a long time.”
She nodded. Together they helped him into the cabin and sat him in the trunk chair in front of the fire. He asked for more whisky and she poured him some. While he sipped at it they arranged their seats close to him. The fire wavered in the hot and orange coals. The sheet of it pressed out into the darkened space of the cabin in waves. It took him minutes before he started to talk.
IT WAS THE WAR
that brought him to the world. He was eleven when his father went to fight it and he found that
sudden absence jarring, like a tooth that falls out when you chew. It could sit in your palm and be seen as a tooth but its place was gone and there was only a hole. He’d never heard of Europe, Germans, or Hitler. They were only sounds to him, and the only meaning he found for them was the gap in his life when his father sauntered off to meet the train. The war was the knowledge that things could be taken away.
“Send his pay home,” his mother said. “It’s what he says. Like that’s a good enough reason to fight.”
His father became envelopes. He became the sporadic ones his mother picked up from the general delivery box or the ones she gave him to lick before she sent them off to Belgium, France, and Italy. He became the taste of glue. They were set down in a shack on a sugar beet farm in Taber, Alberta. His mother cooked and sewed and helped with chores in the outbuildings. The pay wasn’t much but the job put a roof over their heads. He went to work in the fields. Most days he followed along behind the machine that slung the beets into a wagon, picking up strays and lugging them in a sack tied to his waist. The little they could spare went into a cigar box his mother kept below the floorboards beneath her bed. The bed they shared.