Tears in the Grass

For my sons,

Joshua and Tobiah

Contents

Preface

Epigraph

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

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12

13

14

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39

Acknowledgements

Iwatch the child struggle. Trying to make her mouth do what her father’s mouth has done. Lips pressed together to make buh . Upper teeth grazed over the lower lip with a puff of air to give fuh . And finally the rounded lips for lo .

Buffalo.

I like to see the word spoken even though it isn’t correct.

I’m a bison. Buffalo or bison, it matters little. As with others who have come here, the word seemed to mean nothing to the girl, even after her father said the Mounties made huge coats from my hide, the Indians pemmican from my flesh.

They’ve moved on now, on to the next gallery. I’ve never seen it but I can guess from the comments — the large brown eyes, how gracefully they run — that it’s a deer. I’ve always been in this gallery. Along with a rabbit that never ceases to crouch in the long grasses. Grasses that are brittle and unscented, not moist and sweet smelling like those I was raised on.

The child’s stumbling lips stir memories of calves in the springtime.

Swaying bodies. Crumbling legs. Then sprawled on the ground.

There is nothing about calves in the plaque that hangs beside my gallery. Through countless recitations I’ve come to know what is written there:

Bison (Bison bison). Weight ranges from 800 to 1,500 pounds. Largest land mammal on the North American continent. Roamed in the Plains regions — Saskatchewan, Alberta, Montana, South Dakota, Kansas. At its zenith is estimated to have numbered in the millions. Of great importance to Plains Indians.

Some who come to the museum give barely a glance in my direction. Some of the younger ones run their tongues over my glass, draw their fingers through the wetness.

Why do they come? Do they come to remember? Or is it new memories they seek?

Do they want to know that in my life, before this museum, I fathered many calves?

It wasn’t easy to get with a cow. If she wasn’t ready for you she’d push and shove, turn away, or drop onto her belly or knees. My loud voice and fearsome challenges of the younger bulls were of no consequence. The cow decided when she’d be mounted. Once she did, it was a quick affair. Always the wolves were lurking. And there were other cows to be attended to if the herd was to remain strong.

Through the dark prairie winter the cows swelled up with the next generation.

If the winter wasn’t too harsh, in the spring many calves, slippery and wet, dropped onto the earth.

Every year it was the same. Until it stopped.

Until the hunting was relentless.

Why do they come?

There was one person, an old Indian woman, with whom it was different.

When she visited, my glass seemed to disappear.

The buffalo are strange animals; sometimes they are so stupid and infatuated that a man may walk up to them in full sight on the open prairie, and even shoot several of their number before the rest will think it is necessary to retreat. Again at another moment they will be so shy and wary, that in order to approach them the utmost skill, experience and judgment are necessary.

— Francis Parkman, Buffalo Hunt, 1849

1

Wrinkled moccasins scraping over a painted plywood floor that rarely felt the scratch of a broom, Elinor shuffled to the kitchen and banged the kettle onto the stove. A shiver, unfettered by flannel pajamas and thick sweater, sped the length of her thin body. She loved autumn. For the abundance of the harvest and the raft of colours and tones that the Earth’s plants brought forth. And she hated autumn. Autumn ushered in the cold, and for that, autumn could not be forgiven.

She dropped two tea bags into the brown crockery teapot and headed for her rocker.

The old chair was the only piece of furniture her mother had owned. Her mother had found the chair on the prairie, sprawled on its side, dusted in prairie silt and strewn with a spider’s webbing. The spider, its abdomen bulging with a white egg sac, was larger than any her mother had seen. After the egg sac broke open and the mass of squirming creatures scurried onto the ground, disappearing amongst the grasses, Elinor’s mother tied a rope around the rocker and dragged it back to their camp. She knew that where Spider had taken up residence and given birth would be a place of creativity and stories.

Elinor eased her stiff body into the rocker. Tugging at her socks, she wondered what the temperature had gotten to in the night.

At first her mother had been frightened by the rocker, the way it rolled back and forth but didn’t go anywhere. Theirs was the only tipi with such a contraption. For a long while no one went near the chair except Elinor’s mother and Elinor’s baby sister, who knew no fear. Over time everyone in the camp came to have a look. And some — there were always those who sought a bit of excitement and risk — chose to sit in the rocker and experience its ride.

Elinor — in those days she was called Red Sky in the Morning — was the only one who saw that the rocker could move of its own accord. It happened in winter, when the nights were long and the moon in its fullness showered light through the smoke hole at the top of the tipi. The creaking came first. Squeerk. Squeerk. Squeerk. Then Elinor saw them: babies, tiny children, old men and young women. They spoke in words she didn’t understand. Sometimes the voices were joyous, filled with mirth and laughter; other times there was sadness and crying. Years later when Elinor remembered those times, she’d recognize the sounds as English and German, then French, and finally Cree, Saulteaux, and Assiniboine.

Elinor urged her body out of the rocker. Using two hands to steady her movement, she spilled hot water over the tea bags. She took milk from the fridge and the sugar bowl from the cupboard. Leaning against the counter, waiting for the tea to brew — she liked it strong so the flavour clung to her tongue — she studied the rocker. An invisible patina, layers of her life, covered the chair’s surface. Sweat and grease from the palms of her father, husband, and brothers. Jam and candy from her children’s fingers, tears from their sorrows. And salt, oil, and flour — a remembrance from the years when she made the bannock.

She squeezed the tea bags against the side of the pot, filled a cup two-thirds full, leaving space for lots of milk and two heaping teaspoons of sugar.

She returned to the rocker.

The tea burned her tongue but she didn’t mind. She liked the graze of the hot liquid slipping down her throat, plunking into her belly. She smiled at the sound of the honking. Honking. Honking. Loud and louder. Then soft and softer.

Canada geese. Black-necked birds that cleaved the skies in a V.

The rocker faced east, overlooking the valley. When Alice, Elinor’s granddaughter, was in high school, she’d researched the geological history of the valley. Although Elinor had listened intently to Alice’s enthusiastic recitation of all the facts she had accumulated, Elinor remembered none of it.

Elinor was acquainted with the valley in ways that would never get into a school textbook. She knew the valley’s steepest flanks, its hidden portals, the calm waters where ducks nested. She knew that the grasses faded by summer to shades of biscuit, buff, and tan and that the oval leaves of the saskatoon bush curled to burnt orange. She knew the strong blow of the wind and how it whispered when the moon rose. She knew, without the aid of her eyes, the best places to hunt rabbit, quail, and gopher, where strawberries, wild onion, saskatoon berries, and the healing herbs were most prolific.

She knew … she knew …

Elinor drained the mug of the last drop of tea. She rolled her lips together and licked the sweetness from them. And as it was wont to do these days, her mind rolled over to another time in her life.

That school had been a betrayal of the valley’s past. The white frame building stood in the middle of the valley like a canker, sucking life from all that entered its doors. When the thing burned down a few years ago, Elinor was surprised by the relief that had come to her. She tried to remember the silly song that she’d made up for herself during the difficult times, something with colours, red berries, and egg yolk. It frustrated her how stories and experiences that had been so important at one time couldn’t be retrieved from her mind, while other things, memories that she wanted to be free of, remained permanently stuck, entrenched like a badger in its hole.

The outhouse was the one place to which she could escape at that school. Out of sight, the lock on her side of the door, she’d watch the shadows of tree branches jump on the walls or a long-legged spider amble the width of the little building. Even though her cottage had indoor plumbing, she still used the outhouse from time to time. Especially in the summers she enjoyed the warm, close space that held the smells of rotting wood, lye, shit, and pee.

Elinor shivered and tugged the crocheted shawl around her shoulders. It had been a gift from her sister, Lillian, for her last birthday. She stared at the black iron stove in the corner of the room and told herself she should make a fire. If Joseph was alive he would have done that already.

Over the nine decades of her life she had not forgotten her first day at that school. It was autumn and a short time after her people had moved onto the reserves. She was ten, maybe eleven. Long after the rattling boards and squeaking wooden spokes of her father’s horse-drawn wagon had disappeared into the first dip of the trail, she’d cried. Like the creeks in springtime, the tears had gushed from her eyes. Still her father didn’t look back.

Within minutes of her father’s departure she was stripped of her clothing, scrubbed with a harsh brush, soap and cold water, until every inch of her body throbbed. The hair cutting followed. The yellow planks of the pine flooring disappeared beneath the swirls and clumps of black hair. A White Neck, the name they gave to the nuns, wielded scissors like a farmer with a scythe in a field of weeds. How cold her ears had been that day. The entire time she was at that school they never got warm.

Never cut the hair again, Elinor muttered, bringing a match to a sprig of sweetgrass. Most mornings she smudged. Leaning forward, she cupped her hands and scooped the sweet smoke toward her.

To her eyes so she might see more clearly …

To her ears so she listened with greater wisdom …

To her mouth so her lips would speak with truthfulness …

In the four directions.

She gave thanks to the Creator for the Earth, the waters, the sky, and all creatures and plants. And for those who were choosing to build on the land, she asked that they thank the creatures who would lose their homes. If it was a day when she planned to paint — those came less often now — she thanked the Creator for the gift of being able to create, to put to paper in colour and shape her experiences of the Earth, images from inside her head, and sentiments and textures, feelings, from the depths of her heart.

She pressed together her shrunken lips. No teeth. Still in the glass by her bed. That would be an advantage of one of those homes. Someone would fetch her dentures.

Louise, her daughter, thought Elinor should be in a home, one of those places where a young girl made tea and brought it to you. She wouldn’t need to worry about anything, Louise said. But Elinor didn’t worry now; she imagined she’d worry more in one of those places. Besides, one of those homes wouldn’t want an old Cree woman. Politicians weren’t interested in helping Indians to live longer. Her people had signed Treaty Four in 1874. It was now 1967, or ’68, she couldn’t keep track. It had taken almost a hundred years, until 1960, for her people to get the vote. That was how much the government cared for her people.

One of those homes might take her sister, Lillian. She was fussier about her house, her clothing, her entire life. As far as Elinor knew, Lillian didn’t smoke or burn the herbs.

Some days Elinor longed to be back on the reserve. But after Joseph’s death she couldn’t bear it. Even though her friends, women she had grown up with, begged her to stay on. And when John, Louise’s husband, told her about the cottage, she knew it was all she needed.

She yawned. The past few weeks, awakened by voices, faces she couldn’t bring into focus, she’d not slept well. The voices urged her to speak, to get on with the telling of what for so long she had kept to herself. But what she must speak of required a receptacle, a vessel, just as the seeds she planted needed moist and warm earth before they would sprout.

Perhaps her daughter was ready now.

She took up the book that was never far from her, the same book she’d been reading for twenty years. Others read the Bible every day; she read Charles Dickens. Great Expectations. The book was missing a couple of pages; those that remained were dry and yellowed. Her sister, Lillian, had passed on the book, said she didn’t like it much, found it too hard to follow. Given that the two sisters often differed (at least back then) on anything from politics to clothes to what type of soap to buy, Elinor figured she might find the book interesting. And she did. The descriptions of the mist, marshes, fog, and damp of the English countryside fascinated her. As did the array of people Dickens spread over his pages. Some were rough and harsh, even cruel. Others were gentle and generous. There were tidy and proper folks and others who were mangy and dirty, flea-infested. Pip, who told the story, was an orphan, and that being so, he claimed a special place in her heart.

Where was her magnifying glass? Under the book. She withdrew the duck feather she used as a bookmark and settled in. Five minutes later she was asleep.

2

Elinor gazed at the hairy brute. Stocky, broad-chested, head as big as a boulder — a handsome fellow despite his circumstances. From the far reaches of her mind her father’s voice, slow and sonorous, spoke of a time when the plains were dark with grazing, roaming, rutting walnut-brown bison. She’d met paskw â wi-mostos in her dreams; in her wakefulness the smell of his long hair, the sound of his thick breathing lingered.

He was still a grand creature, despite being housed behind glass, doused in artificial light. Although she preferred the real thing, at least this fellow wasn’t going anywhere. Probably her own legs couldn’t travel much farther than his. She was grateful for the assistance of the town’s postmistress, who lent her car and son to drive Elinor into the city. Without Jeremy’s assistance, she wasn’t sure she would have made it from the parking lot to the basement of the museum. The Museum of Natural History; she saw nothing natural about a stuffed creature behind glass. Better that he had been able to return to the earth at a pace decided by his own body, the worms, wolves and vultures.

Big Brown. That’s what I’ll call you. I hope that’s acceptable. It’s a pleasure to be with you. I had no idea you were here, Big Brown. Red Sky in the Morning was the name that was first given to me; a red star burned in the sky while mother laboured. I was born in the springtime, in the valley. In that school they named me Elinor; they did more than change my name in that place. But we won’t speak of that now, Big Brown.

She took out her pencil and flipped open her sketch pad. She made a few bold strokes and a half-dozen ovals of different sizes to represent the different areas of the body: Head. Torso. Hips. Shoulders and legs.

Working in small strokes, moving outward from the top and centre, Elinor sketched the oval perimeter of the head. She went down one side to the beard then did the same on the other side. She put crosses to mark the place for the eyes; she’d work on them last. She stared at the neck. Massive and thick, far shorter than the necks of deer, horses, and antelope, it was barely discernible between the head and shoulders. Given the size of the head, how could it be otherwise? She marked out the bulge of the right shoulder and sketched a line down to the knee.

When her fingers started to cramp, she put down her pencil, stretched out her fingers, and squeezed them into a fist. She repeated the movements two or three times. She couldn’t work as long as she used to. In her prime she’d keep at the work for ten or twelve hours a day, several days running. Now she had good and bad days. Some days she worked standing up, other days she’d sit. She stepped back to get a different perspective. Spotting the rabbit crouched in the corner of the gallery, she muttered its name: "Wâposos, wâposos."

She moved closer to the gallery, then back. She looked at what she’d drawn, then to the bison, then back to her drawing. She shook her head.

Proportions aren’t right, Big Brown. Head needs to be larger, neck thicker.

She told herself this picture would take some time.

She dropped into her chair. Her eyelids flickered then slid downward.

The tail of the bison twitched.

3

Louise had always loved Mary. Not that she would say that to Mary. Theirs was not the kind of relationship in which one discussed feelings about the other. Most of the time Louise didn’t put the two words — Mary and love — in the same sentence, even though Mary took up a large part of Louise’s heart, as she had for most of her life. Some might say Louise didn’t have much of a heart, the things she’d done in her life. But Louise knew she wasn’t without heart, she just didn’t wear it on her sleeve. Frequently she tipped waitresses a little extra. When she knew a client was barely scraping by, she charged him less than the going rate. For years she’d helped out at the animal shelter on holiday weekends, cleaning out pens, brushing matted fur from decrepit, scabby cats, bathing flea-ridden dogs.

Light streamed from an east-facing window into Mary’s living room, a room that was cluttered with old newspapers, Eaton’s and seed catalogues from years ago, a loom that Mary threatened to get rid of, folded laundry, and bags of wool. Louise sank into the navy blue armchair, her long legs stretched before her. She wore black linen pants, a white blouse, and a pale blue cardigan. Her physique was well-rounded, heavier around the hips than she’d like. She kept her black hair short, hoping to mitigate the advance of the greys and whites.

Mary was a short, thin, and wiry woman. Her thick salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back and tied with a piece of string. Swaddled in a bulky red sweater buttoned to her chin and brown pants stained with grease and oil and bits of food, she sat on the maroon corduroy couch, her feet drawn beneath her. On the floor sat her ochre deerskin moccasins. The stitching around the toes was giving way, but she’d never toss them; they had been a gift from Louise.

Mary had never told Louise her age. Louise guessed there were five or six years between them. Mary, the older of the two, was probably sixty-six or sixty-seven years old.

So, tell me again, Louise asked, trying to suppress a smile, how exactly did you manage to scrape almost every inch of your face and arms? You look like you’ve just stepped out of a boxing ring.

Mary threw a ball of wool at Louise.

The two had met in town almost fifty years ago, the early 1920s, just after the First World War. Although a heady time for many, it hadn’t been that way for them. Both runaways, they were keening for a better life. At least that’s what they told each other. Mary had been in town for six or eight months, although initially she’d told Louise she was born there. They lied to each other a lot in those days, as they lied to everyone.

Mary wound a strand of blue wool over the end of her knitting needle. Knitting, she said, kept her fingers limber. The needles clicked over each other. The few things she knew how to knit — scarves, socks, mitts — she gave to her sons and grandchildren as birthday gifts.

Neither woman spoke for a time. It was often that way between them. Just to be in the other’s company was sufficient. Like a couple of old cats who shared the same house, knew of the other’s presence, but found little reason or need to interact. The simplicity of her time with Mary was a respite for Louise, a retreat from her busy life as a lawyer. As much as she enjoyed the intellectual gymnastics, took satisfaction from seeing fairness and justice achieved, it had kept her from her family, from herself, from a good night’s sleep. But her chronic restlessness and discontent she knew came from a deeper place. Elinor said Louise was like a porcupine, prickly, but if approached carefully, the barbs were kept in check. Louise knew about the barbs; they’d come into existence those first months after she’d left the reserve. Over the years they’d dulled and were slower to emerge. But they were still there, and often necessary in her law practice.

So, what brings you out this time? Mary asked, peering over the top of her glasses.

You, my dear, Louise said. It’s always you.

Mary laughed. After all these years you still think you can pull that lawyerly stuff with me. Well, I’ll humour you. And while I’m doing that, why don’t you open that bottle of wine you brought? Hope it’s better than the last one you dragged out here.

And which one was that? Louise asked.

"That French one. La Belle something or other. Rouge or blanc."

That’s not saying much, Louise said. You don’t remember.

It will come to me.

Louise searched for the corkscrew. She couldn’t assume from one visit to the next where things were kept in Mary’s house. And it was useless to ask; Mary’s housekeeping was erratic. She didn’t live by the dictum A place for everything, and everything in its place. Mary lived alone, and as best as Louise could tell, never minded having to search for things. Louise preferred the direct route to what she wanted; all the detours in Mary’s house frustrated her. She sighed as she closed one drawer and opened another.

It’s in the drawer to the left of the stove, Mary said.

Already checked that one.

Maybe on the back porch, then.

Louise stepped out onto the porch, and the scent of warm earth wafted toward her. When she visited Mary at the height of summer, the fields that surrounded her house were golden with ripening wheat. A yellow-breasted meadowlark flew from the fence post at the bottom of the garden. In the middle of the weathered table constructed from half a wooden door sat the corkscrew, a cork still on the end of it.

Louise and Mary didn’t meet regularly, as in every two weeks or three months, or the third Sunday or first Monday of the month. But in the past four decades they had managed to get together two or three times a year. They couldn’t not get together. Their visits were a necessary reaffirmation, although never spoken about, of what they had shared, what they had done, more than forty years earlier. Mary rarely initiated these visits. Perhaps she was less fearful; she had less to lose than Louise.

What propelled Louise to contact Mary, she did not understand. She didn’t care or try to understand. She wasn’t one for that kind of reflection. It might be something in the news: A man lost in dense forest, found days later half-dead. A calf that had strayed from its mother, strangled in barbed-wire fencing. Or a black woman in the Deep South raped by a gang of white youths. Or it could be a change in the weather, something as simple as that. Whatever the event, it left a ping, an irritation at the back of Louise’s mind. A day or two later she’d call Mary. If it wasn’t a story in the news it was the dream, the same dream Louise had had for years. Two girls on the prairie running and chasing each other in the bright sun, their play interrupted by strong winds, dark clouds, then they are running, running to hide from the storm. Always Louise awoke in a sweat, a sense of choking, being choked, finding her own hands around