Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese Page B

first it was shared meals in the cookhouse where his mother worked. Jenks listened to their talk and marvelled at how easy it came out of them. Then stews and soups and plates carried over to the shack they called home. The candles, the talk eased and made merrier by the flow of wine and beer that Jenks seemed never in shortage of. He watched his mother’s face change in the light of the man’s attention. She became girlish; shy, then bursting out into soft blooms of laughter, one hand covering her mouth. Jenks himself grew more animated, sparkling in her company, the rough and manly jokes making Jimmy and him gape at the daring it took to say them in front of a woman. She never complained. Instead, she came to share his boisterous energy and they rollicked in the wash of the tales she spun of camps and fields and tough men and tougher women. Later, when the words from the books quieted them down, her face composed itself into lines and edges gilded by the soft yellow candlelight, framed in the rapture of magic spells cast by faceless men in a long ago time, and they were hushed and dazzled, made into children again, and each of the three of them loved her for her acts of conjuring, shifting nights into days of adventure, daring, and mystery. The words compelling in the textures she wove them in. The dreams made real by the shifts of tone, emphasis, and the long, almost painful pauses she held them with, restrained and breathless, until released into the flow of the tale again. He watched Jenks reach one callused finger out to touch the back of her hand one night and the edges of her lips curled into a small smile while she read.
    Stories were his wound. When he came to think of them it wasn’t for the glimmer of worlds spun out of darkness and firelight, it was for the sudden holes life can sometimes fall into. Their cabin at the logging camp became Jenks’ second home. He rarely left. At first he was just there in the mornings, curled up by the fire in a sleeping bag. Then he was at his mother’s side, walking through the bush or along the edge of the stream. Then he was the lump beside her in her bed.
    “Thought she loved your dad,” Jimmy said.
    He spat in the dirt and rubbed at it with the toe of his boot. “Me too,” he said.
    “So what’s this then?”
    “Maybe she’s lonesome.”
    “Lonesome’s one thing. Shackin’ up’s another.”
    He lit up a smoke. They’d both taken to tobacco and he lit another off the end of his and handed it to Jimmy. They stood in the trees, eying the cabin where his mother and Jenks slept through the mid-morning haze.
    Jenks became a demanding boss. There was a tougher edge to his voice and he separated himself from them. There were harsh orders and he rode them hard and insisted on a deliberate approach to the booming. There was no room for play. But they took his words without complaint. They felt the line he drew between them and shrugged him off and set to work. They understood that. The need to bend your back to things. The need to get a job done for the job’s sake. They’d been raised with it. But it didn’t make the change any more likeable.
    “Frickin’ thinks he owns us now,” Jimmy said.
    “Big man now, I guess,” he said. “Probably never had no woman before.”
    “Not like your mom, least ways.”
    “Straight fact,” he said.
    He saw the first bruise after a month.
    She walked out of the bedroom ramrod straight. She walked to the counter and clattered some dishes into a pile in a ten-gallon pail and splashed water and soap over them. It was morning. He watched her and when she turned to look at him the bruise sat in a ring around her throat. Purple. Like small blooms. He stood up slowly and he could feel his guts compress. She watched him and her mouth hung open. Her eyes were vacant and dull, a murky sheen on them like black ice.
    “What the fuck?” he said. He’d never used man-talk in front of her before.
    “Eldon.” She said it like a