Home Free by Marni Jackson Page B

were. What does it matter if these are his ashes or just whatever was on the bottom of the crematorium, I thought, but I continued to address the vase as “dad.” I put the new bag inside a dark blue velvet sack supplied to us by Just Cremation. It had a drawstring and reminded me of the old Seagram’s bags we used to keep our marbles in.
    The river was wide, a milk chocolate brown,with a steady, powerful current. The word Saskatchewan means “swiftly flowing river” in Cree, and one of its tributaries flows 1,200 miles, to the Bow Valley in Alberta. A good long ride. It gives breadth to the city and had dictated the scale and modest majesty of the bridge. In the public library I had found black-and-white photographs of its construction, how the supports were sunk in clay and the engineers had to compensate for the ferocious cold of winter which caused the materials to shrink. “Only four men died in the construction of the bridge,”one news item reported.
    I found a picture of three workers standing behind the rebar skeleton of the bridge’s steel supports. One figure, not the tallest, wore a cloth cap that did not hide his ears, which stuck out, just like my dad’s. The face was obscured, but there was a certain jaunty eagerness in the posture. I was convinced it was him.
    My cousin Margaret Ann, from Colonsay, stood behind me on the riverbank. She didn’t know my father well, being from my mother’s side of the family, but she was kind enough to tour me around Saskatoon and to witness this increasingly odd ritual. The moment was awkward and unceremonial, but still, when I squatted by the water and looked up at the rib cage of the bridge, my mind filled with thoughts: of my father and mother skating on the river, which they loved to do; of my father working at the YMCA a few blocks away, typing the witty, flirtatious letters with which he wooed my mother; of my mother in the frame house on 10th St. wondering when my father would come home for dinner from the bridge-in-progress. of my mother quitting her job as a switchboard operator, because the “relief project” hired only married men, and couples could only hold one job.
    Traffic gleamed on the bridge, and my good shoes slipped on the stones at the water’s edge. I untwisted the ties and tried to shuffle out the ashes, but they had been tamped down, and I had to dig them out. They sank, except for a few small clumps that caught on weeds, sticking like frog’s eggs. I shook and shook the bag—it took a long time. Margaret Ann clicked her disposable camera. The fine grit got under my nails, and when I had emptied the bag I saw that my hand was grey, cadaver grey, gloved with the dust. I clambered back up the riverbank.
    â€œWell, that’s that,” I said to my cousin, in my mother’s words. She smiled and said nothing. Sentiment is not a prairie thing. We walked back to her car and drove past the city limits to the RV campground that she manages with her husband, in the great curving space west of Saskatoon. It had been farmland until the farms failed. Colonsay’s grain elevator, one of the old wooden ones, was scheduled to come down soon. My hand, with its ghostly coating, lay radioactive beside me on the handle of the car door. Like having something stuck between my teeth, I urgently wanted the grit out from under my fingernails. But there was nothing to be done until we reached the campground,where I was staying in the guest trailer, a perfect, surreal bubble of shag-rug domesticity up on cement blocks.
    Margaret Ann went back to the house to prepare dinner. Inside, I went over to the sink and turned on the taps. I watched the last filaments of grey dust run off my hand and down the sink as the trailer rocked a bit, buffeted by the soft, strong, constant prairie wind.

Be Home by Dinner
    I ’M THREE OR FOUR years old. We’re living in a two-storey brick house on Stillwater Crescent, a