succumbed to a third piece of my mother’s flax bread, Eli would be killed in a fight. Hat on backwards, the moneylenders wouldcancel Dad’s loan. Boots placed right to left—or worse, if one fell over in the night—Riel would hang, Eli would die, Peter would lose the farm. Alice alone was safe from the quick trigger of my influence. Our future was littered with hidden mines.
Fall soured summer. The crop was okay. We persisted. We worked hard. We hired a guy to help out awhile and I loaned him a pillow and he complained later that I’d given him head lice and it took endless washings with Mama’s bleach to rid me of the scratching and my hair turned white and dry and stood up frizz-full of static and nobody would touch me because I gave off such a shock, worse if you’d just licked your lips before a goodnight kiss.
It began to snow in October, but not enough to stay on the ground. I wished it would. Without snow, the cold gnawed on the deepest roots, ate light and life till it was all zero. Freezing cold. Sound of our shoes on frozen mud, horses slipping, and I was there just yearning, praying for the bafflement of snow.
It got sunny. Really cold. Waking up to a silver skin of frost, I looked over the edge of my bed and saw my left boot pointing east. And I knew. My prayers and complaints, my appetite for fresh bread, my carelessness with my hat, all had led to this: Riel would hang and the world would lose, lose, and it would mark the beginning of an evil era where the good guys die because they’re good and the bad guys win because they’re good at being bad.
And Riel did hang. November 16, in the morning. He asked for three eggs and a glass of milk. Then he walked alone onto the scaffold, and they put a noose around his neck and dropped him through the floor of the gallows. And Eli would tell melater (not realizing it was an accusation, and confused when I responded to his story by getting down on my hands and knees and begging forgiveness) that Riel had stood with his head high and tried to calm the frightened priest.
“Courage, Father,” Riel had said.
Courage.
CHAPTER TWO
D AD RESPECTED MY FONDNESS for Marie’s cabin, though he never went there himself. Whenever he saw me heading in that direction, he got quiet and pious, like somebody coming into church. I never asked him why. He and my mother framed the drawing of the buffalo and hung it over the kitchen table. And they built fences around the fences. “Our property,” he called it, spitting. “Our p-property,” twitchy and defensive.
“Our property” had begun as a place to lie down, no bigger than the space of a dream. The disbursement of $160 hadn’t defined it much. The land they’d supposedly bought was a shadow at the outskirts of firelight, yielding as far as the tall, dead white oak, its bark peeled away; there, where the land lies low and then rises a little, and to the east somewhere, the lightning-struck elm, a great hump of roots that looks like a bear.
When I was born, Peter turned into a wood-gnawing creature. His early patriarchal impulses were suburban. Tools of fatherhood: axe and harrow. He cut down five, ten, fifteen, twenty acres of bush, harnessed horses to their roots and hauled them into great pyres and set fire to them. All day, the slender branches of silver-leafed aspen smoked beneath the flaming roots of elm and oak, slowly smouldering while my dad returned to the house and lifted his blonde infant in his smoky hands to his smoky chest.
They slept with fine black soil in their hair, littering the bedding with grasses and ash; they dreamed thick green dreams of fire and seed.
And Marie hovered over our lives. Her cabin grew out of the strange stand of black spruce on land we wished to be ours. Marie was fixed. She arrived, as soft as the dust on a moth’s wing, and left a permanent dye upon our fingertips. She would linger.
And Peter had borrowed money from somewhere.
The moth will stir at the back of the
Fall soured summer. The crop was okay. We persisted. We worked hard. We hired a guy to help out awhile and I loaned him a pillow and he complained later that I’d given him head lice and it took endless washings with Mama’s bleach to rid me of the scratching and my hair turned white and dry and stood up frizz-full of static and nobody would touch me because I gave off such a shock, worse if you’d just licked your lips before a goodnight kiss.
It began to snow in October, but not enough to stay on the ground. I wished it would. Without snow, the cold gnawed on the deepest roots, ate light and life till it was all zero. Freezing cold. Sound of our shoes on frozen mud, horses slipping, and I was there just yearning, praying for the bafflement of snow.
It got sunny. Really cold. Waking up to a silver skin of frost, I looked over the edge of my bed and saw my left boot pointing east. And I knew. My prayers and complaints, my appetite for fresh bread, my carelessness with my hat, all had led to this: Riel would hang and the world would lose, lose, and it would mark the beginning of an evil era where the good guys die because they’re good and the bad guys win because they’re good at being bad.
And Riel did hang. November 16, in the morning. He asked for three eggs and a glass of milk. Then he walked alone onto the scaffold, and they put a noose around his neck and dropped him through the floor of the gallows. And Eli would tell melater (not realizing it was an accusation, and confused when I responded to his story by getting down on my hands and knees and begging forgiveness) that Riel had stood with his head high and tried to calm the frightened priest.
“Courage, Father,” Riel had said.
Courage.
CHAPTER TWO
D AD RESPECTED MY FONDNESS for Marie’s cabin, though he never went there himself. Whenever he saw me heading in that direction, he got quiet and pious, like somebody coming into church. I never asked him why. He and my mother framed the drawing of the buffalo and hung it over the kitchen table. And they built fences around the fences. “Our property,” he called it, spitting. “Our p-property,” twitchy and defensive.
“Our property” had begun as a place to lie down, no bigger than the space of a dream. The disbursement of $160 hadn’t defined it much. The land they’d supposedly bought was a shadow at the outskirts of firelight, yielding as far as the tall, dead white oak, its bark peeled away; there, where the land lies low and then rises a little, and to the east somewhere, the lightning-struck elm, a great hump of roots that looks like a bear.
When I was born, Peter turned into a wood-gnawing creature. His early patriarchal impulses were suburban. Tools of fatherhood: axe and harrow. He cut down five, ten, fifteen, twenty acres of bush, harnessed horses to their roots and hauled them into great pyres and set fire to them. All day, the slender branches of silver-leafed aspen smoked beneath the flaming roots of elm and oak, slowly smouldering while my dad returned to the house and lifted his blonde infant in his smoky hands to his smoky chest.
They slept with fine black soil in their hair, littering the bedding with grasses and ash; they dreamed thick green dreams of fire and seed.
And Marie hovered over our lives. Her cabin grew out of the strange stand of black spruce on land we wished to be ours. Marie was fixed. She arrived, as soft as the dust on a moth’s wing, and left a permanent dye upon our fingertips. She would linger.
And Peter had borrowed money from somewhere.
The moth will stir at the back of the
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