Ragged Company (42 page)

F
UCK
’
EM ALL
but six. All but the six you need, because everybody needs pallbearers. The six I had would be rounders. Screw the Square Johns. The thing about a rounder is he’ll wrap himself up in his stuff, his inside stuff, like he wraps himself up in the blankets he sleeps in. Insulated. Guarded. The keep off sign suggested like a fist in the air. Tell me I’m not solid. Tell me I let Dick down by not talking to him. Tell me that I’m to blame. Fuck. I wasn’t never no charity case and I sure as hell ain’t one now. I don’t need anyone to tell me how to figure out my way around the world. I don’t need anyone to tell me what I’m supposed to do. Do for a friend. How to talk. How to behave in my own home. Home. What a friggin’ laugh. This isn’t a home. It’s a flop, just like every other flop in every fleabag joint I ever laid up in. Garbage. There’s still fucking garbage everywhere. Only thing is, here the garbage’s got a fancier name. I’ll find Dick. I’ll drive that truck into the friggin’ ground until I find him. Then what’ll they say? That I don’t know how to look after my winger? That I let him down? That I don’t take care of my end? Fuck ’em. All but six. I don’t need anybody. Never did. Never will.

I
SMOOTHED HIS FACE
like the blade was my fingers. I sat there in candlelight and used the very least edge of my knife, nicking the wood, barely touching it with steel, caressing it almost, urging it to talk, to tell me where the man who inhabited this wood was sitting right at that moment so I could go to him. We needed him.
I
needed him. He was as essential as breathing. Without him, we were separated by distances too huge to cross. We had strength and thought and spirit, but we lacked innocence and trust and feeling. Dick was that. All of that. The nexus. The joining. Our bridge to each other. This carving was going to tell him that. It wasn’t about sadness now. It wasn’t about weight. It was about being there. Inhabiting your place in this world. Regardless. It was about being seen, visible, real. It was about the great fact that some of us get to realize: that home is not about a place, not about a building, not about geography or even a time; home is belonging in someone else’s heart. Just the way you are. Warts and all. This carving would say all that because that was Dick’s great teaching, the learning hidden in his absence. I would tell him that. I’d tell him that he had a home in my heart now and always. Regardless.

I
SAID IN THE BEGINNING OF IT ALL
that some lives are never meant to cross. I told myself that gross circumstances cause disparate meetings and that the only rational reaction is dismissal and moving on. I told myself that those four lives and mine had no common denominator, no edges that overlapped. Except for the movies. I wondered whether that had ever truly been enough. They were right to be offended by my prodding. They were right to be angered by my reluctance to talk about my world. Other than the sketch I’d given that one night, I hadn’t said another word about myself. When the hands on the street are held out, it isn’t always alms that are beggared; it’s life, contact, touch,
generosity of spirit—and I’d lost sense of that, if I ever really had it at all. Beggary. It’s not the sole property of the street people or the ill defined. It’s part of all of us, part of everyone who has ever suffered loss. A handout. It meant something more suddenly. It meant more than the image and the idea of a dirty, wrinkled, weakened hand stretched outward to accept nickels and dimes. It meant every hand extended across the galaxy of separation that exists between all of us. All of us beggars. We are in the end, all of us, beggarly, seeking connection, the redemption of contact. Double Dick Dumont was teaching me that, and I’d tell him and thank him as soon as I saw him.

B
EN
S
TARR
came to my room. He walked right in through the window and sat at the edge of my bed and started talking as though the years between our last meeting had never happened, as though life had simply carried on and absence and longing were not a part of the language we spoke. He talked about travelling. He talked about poetry and how words on paper were becoming the song he was learning to sing. He talked about love in the blinking orange light of the Regal and how it had put the poetry and the music inside of him, how it made him want to write me, sculpt me with language, mould me, define my edges like his hands used to trace my angles and curves and hollows.

“I have you here,” he said to me, and held out his fingertips.

Then he stood up, looked at me for a long moment, and stepped back to the window.

Then Harley came. My little brother Harley. He ran in through the curtains and sat at the same spot that Ben had and talked to me. He told me about horses. Spirit Dogs, he called them, and how he was learning to call them from across the wide prairies. They’d come to him, their hoof beats like a drum song, and encircle him, nickering and neighing, and he’d tell them stories. Stories about their human brothers and sisters and how they needed the Spirit Dogs to carry them, to help them, to make them more. Then one would always choose itself and offer its back. Harley would ride. Ride wild and free. Ride with the spirit of the Old Ones.

“We get to go back to it,” he said to me, and smiled.

Then he made room for John. John. My big brother John. He walked in and sat beside Harley and draped a big arm around his shoulders. He was wearing Grass Dancer regalia. There were long tufts of prairie grass tied to his arms and legs and waist and
he wore elegantly beaded moccasins on his feet. A single eagle’s feather stood in a headpiece made of a porcupine’s tail and his face was painted in the old way, a rich ochre from the earth in three wavy lines down his face. He talked to me about being sent out to dance with the rest of the young men, to bless the gathering place of the People, to make it ready for their feet to come and pray and sing and dance in celebration of life. He talked about being blessed with the dance.

“You become a protector,” he said to me.

Then Frankie walked in. Frank One Sky. He had a drum in his hands. It was an old drum and he showed it to me in great detail, explaining how it was made of a single ring of tree trunk, how burning-hot rocks were used to hollow out the ring, to burn away the inner wood. Then he told me about the elk skin stretched across it. He hit it once or twice and spoke about the high tone of the elk skin, about the blessings within its song. A marten was painted on its face. Frankie told me how those without a clan become Marten Clan when they enter the Circle of the People.

“It’s a Warrior Clan,” he said. “We get to be warriors.”

“Spirit warriors,” my brother Irwin said as he walked in to sit beside his brothers. “You get to heal the people.”

He carried a water drum. He smiled when he showed it to me. The drum was old and he held it like he would a Grandfather: gently, tenderly, respectfully. He told me about the old songs that were sung around campfires and how the spirit of those songs got right to the inside of things and made them smoother. He told me that everyone got to sing together. All the People. Everyone got to be healed by the unity around the fire and the spirit of the songs. Everyone.

And suddenly they were all there. All of them, standing at my window looking at me and dressed in ceremonial garb like I’d never seen before. Old. Simple. Honourable. Eagle feathers few and far between. Sacred symbols carried proudly in their hands. Hair tied in prayer braids. Grandma One Sky, my mother, father, everyone from Big River who I’d seen depart—and behind them I could sense a thousand more, the shadowed ones who’d allowed
me to witness their search, their prowl, their desire, their reach for life. They were all there. They were all there and they reached their hands out to me, palms up, and offered me comfort. Comfort. I closed my eyes and felt the waves of their beckoning, waves and waves and waves of it, pouring down like silver, telling me it was fine, it was okay, there was peace to come, peace—and I slept hard until morning.

When I woke up, I knew.

“T
HEY FOUND HIM
,” James said.

I stared at the telephone in my hand in the early morning light and shook my head to clear it. “Pardon?” I asked.

“Dick,” he said quietly. “They found him.”

“Oh, good. Finally. Where was he?”

“At the Hilton. He’s dead.”

I felt the world stop. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. Margo looked at me from the bed and put a hand slowly to her face.

“How?” was all I could say.

“He drowned. There was a bottle of pills and a bottle of vodka beside him. He vomited in his sleep and drowned.”

I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. I couldn’t think. “Jesus. Jesus.”

“The police are saying accidental overdose. I spoke to them. He had my card in his wallet and they called. No concern about suicide. It looked too casual. No note, no nothing. The officer said it looked like he’d been studying a map.”

“Do the others know?”

“No. I don’t think it’s something I want to tell them alone.”

“Jesus. Dick. God,” I said, struggling to find language amid the numbness I felt.

“The papers are going to be all over this. I don’t see that there’s a lot we can do to stop it. We need to get over to the house and prepare them.”

“No one’s spoken to each other since that blow up. I’m not even sure they’d let us in. Digger, anyway.”

“He’s going to have to.”

“Yes.”

“Margo there?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be okay?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. I’m not.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Can you be ready?”

“Yes.”

I hung up the phone and slumped back on the bed. I closed my eyes and felt Margo’s hand on my chest. Without opening my eyes, I told her what James had told me—straightforward, direct. I heard her cry. She collapsed against me and we lay there, her tears moistening my skin.

We dressed without speaking. As I watched her in the mirror, I marvelled at the improbable, unbidden meetings that shape us. She had changed me. She had come unbidden, through the improbable union of my life with those of the rounders and of Double Dick Dumont. I owed him so much. I thought about his childlike grin when something touched him and how I had always been envious of his ability to be charmed by the ordinary stuff of living. He taught me to see again, really. Then, as I buttoned my shirt and watched Margo pull on her jeans, I thought of all the questions he asked and marvelled at how incredibly easy it had been for me to simply stop asking questions of life. Double Dick Dumont brought my mind forward again. Strange. An illiterate. A man constantly chasing words and ideas to corral them, capture them, stop their motion so he could see them and come to understand. An unversed beggar taught me that words have a life of their own, and in them, when we take the time to corral them, is the stuff of our own life, the keys to vision. Walking down the stairs, watching the bounce of Margo’s hair in the glow from the skylight, I thought about how sad he’d become at the turn of a tale
or the giddiness he’d move into when stories shone with ebullient conclusions or the sombre look he offered at tragedy and loss. He taught me how to respond again. To move out of the twilight.

T
HE FIRST THING
that told me things were going to be different was the doorbell. Anyone who was part of our circle knew that you just walked into the house and found us wherever we might be. When I got to the door, I was surprised to see Granite, Margo, and James standing there. They’d never had to ring before. I wondered how much a measure of the shouting this was, or if it was something else. They looked as awkward at the change in routine as I felt opening the door for them.

“Timber,” James said. “Are the others awake?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Could you get them, please, and meet us in the kitchen?”

“Yes. Sure.” None of them wanted to look right at me and I felt a shiver in my belly. “What? Is it Dick?”

“Get the others, please,” James said, and the tone of his voice sent me hurrying out the back door toward the garage and the garden. Digger was looking at the workings of a radio splayed apart on his table. I hadn’t been to his door since the night of the shouting and I suddenly felt timid.

“Digger?” I said quietly.

He looked up. When our eyes met, I felt absence like a tear in my chest. He felt it too, and I saw his eyes soften from the initial glare of intrusion.

“Yeah?” he replied.

“Granite, Margo, and James are here. They want to see us in the kitchen.”