“I can’t for the life of me see why not,” his mother said inside. “We could do it now. We’re not doing anything else.”
“I tell you they wouldn’t grow!” his father said, with emphasis on every word. “Why should we run our tongues out doing everything that mealy-mouthed fool does?”
“I don’t want anything but the willows. They’re easy.”
He made his special sound of contempt, half-snort and half-grunt. After a silence she tried again. “They might even have pussies on them in the spring. Mr. Garfield thinks they’d grow, and his wife told me he used to work in a greenhouse.”
“This isn’t a greenhouse, for Chrissake. Go outside and feel that breeze if you think so.”
“Oh, let it go,” she said. “I’ve stood it this long without any green things around. I guess I can stand it some more.”
The boy, aiming now toward the gate where the butcher bird, coming back to his prey, would in just a second fly right into Dead-eye’s unerring bullet, heard his father stand up suddenly.
“Abused, aren’t you?” he said.
His mother’s voice rose. “No, I’m not abused! Only I don’t see why it would be so awful to get some willows. Just because Mr. Garfield gave me the idea, and you don’t like him ...”
“You’re right I don’t like him. He gives me a pain right under the crupper.”
“Because,” his mother’s voice said bitterly, “he calls his wife ‘dear’ and puts his arm around her and likes trees. It wouldn’t occur to you to put your arm around your wife, would it?”
The boy aimed and held his breath. His mother ought to keep 225 still, because if she didn’t she’d get him real mad and then they’d both have to tiptoe around the rest of the day. He heard his father’s breath whistle through his teeth, and his mincing, nasty voice: “Would you like me to put my arm around you now, dear?”
“I wouldn’t let you touch me with a ten-foot pole,” his mother said. She sounded just as mad as he did, and it wasn’t often she let herself get that way. The boy squirmed over when he heard the quick hard steps come up behind him and pause. Then his father’s hand, brown and meaty and felted with fine black hair, reached down over his shoulder and took the .22.
“Let’s see this cannon old Scissor-Bill gave you,” he said.
It was a single-shot, bolt-action Savage, a little rusty on the barrel, the bolt sticky with hardened grease when he removed it. Sighting up through the barrel, he grunted. “Takes care of a gun like he sets a fence. Probably used it to cultivate his luv-ly trees.”
He went out into the porch, and after a minute came back with a rag and a can of machine oil. Hunching the boy over on the step, he sat down and began rubbing the bolt with the oil-soaked rag.
“I just cawn’t bear to shoot anything any more,” he said, and laughed suddenly. “I just cawn’t stick it, little man.” He leered at the boy, who grinned back uncertainly. Squinting through the barrel again, his father breathed through his nose and clamped his lips together, shaking his head.
The sun lay heavy on the baked yard. Out over the corner of the pasture a soaring hawk caught wind and sun at the same time, so that his light breast feathers flashed as he banked and rose. Just wait, the boy said. Wait till I get my gun working and I’ll fix you, you hen-robber. He thought of the three chicks a hawk had struck earlier in the summer, the three balls of yellow with the barred mature plumage just showing through. Two of them dead before he got there and chased the hawk away, the other with its crop slashed open and wheat spilling from it to the ground. His mother had sewed up the crop, and the chicken had lived, but it always looked droopy, like a plant in drouth time, and sometimes it stood working its bill as if choking.
By golly, he thought, I’ll shoot every hawk and butcher bird in twenty miles. I’ll ...
“Rustle around and find me a piece of baling wire,” his father said. “This barrel looks like a henroost.”
Behind the house he found a piece of rusty wire, brought it back and watched his father straighten it, wind a piece of rag around the end, ram it up and down through the barrel, and peer through again. “He’s leaded her so you can hardly see the grooves,” he said. “But maybe she’ll shoot. We’ll fill her with vinegar and cork her up tonight.”
Elsa was behind them, leaning against the jamb and watching. She reached down and rumpled Bo’s black hair. “The minute you get a gun in your hands you start feeling better,” she said. “It’s just a shame you weren’t born a hundred years sooner.”
“A gun’s a good tool,” he said. “It hadn’t ought to be misused. Gun like this is enough to make a guy cry.”
“Well, you’ve at least got to admit it was nice of him to give it to Bruce,” she said. It was the wrong thing to say. The boy had a feeling that she knew it was the wrong thing to say, that she said it anyway just to have one tiny triumph over him. Even before he heard his father’s answer he knew Pa would be mad again.
“Oh sure,” he said. “Mr. Garfield’s a fine man. He can preach a better sermon than anybody in Saskatchewan. God Almighty, I get sick of hearing his praises sung. If you liked it so well why don’t you move over there?”
“If you weren’t so blind stubborn ...”
He rose with the .22 in his hand and brushed past her into the house. “I’m not so blind,” he said heavily in passing. “You’ve been throwing that bastard up to me for two hours. It doesn’t take very good eyes to see what that means. It means I’m no good, I can’t do anything right.”
She started to say, “All because I want a few little ...” but the boy cut in on her, anxious to help the situation somehow. “Will it shoot now?” he said.
His father said nothing. His mother looked down at him, sighed, shrugged, smiled bleakly with a tight mouth. She moved aside when his father came back with a box of cartridges in his hand. He ignored her, speaking to the boy alone in the particular half-jocular tone he always used with him or with the dog when he wasn’t mad.
“Thought I had these around,” he said. “Let’s see what this smoke-pole will do.”
He slipped in a cartridge and locked the bolt, looking around for something to shoot at. Behind him Elsa’s feet moved on the floor, and her voice came purposefully. “I can’t see why you want to act this way,” she said. “I’m going over and get some of those slips myself.”
There was a long silence. The angled shade lay sharp as a knife across the baked front yard, and a breeze stirred in the Russian thistle of the fireguard. Bo’s cheek was pressed against the stock of the gun, his arms and hands as steady as stone.
“How’ll you get there?” he said, whispering down the barrel.
“I’ll walk.”
“Five miles and back.”
“Yes, or fifty miles and back. If there was any earthly reason why you should mind ...”
“I don’t mind,” he said, his voice soft as silk. “Go ahead.”
Close to his mother’s long skirts in the doorway, the boy felt her stiffen as if she had been slapped. He squirmed anxiously, but his desperation could find only the question he had asked before. His voice squeaked on it: “Will it shoot now?”
“See that sparrow out there?” his father said. “Right out by that cactus?”
“Bo!” Elsa said. “If you shoot that harmless little bird!”
Fascinated, the boy watched his father’s dark face against the rifle stock, the locked, immovable left arm, the thick finger crooked inside the trigger-guard almost too small to hold it. He saw the sparrow, gray, white-breasted, hopping obliviously in search of bugs, fifty feet out on the gray earth.
“I just ... cawn’t ... bear ... to ... shoot ... anything,” his father said, his face like dark stone, his lips hardly moving. “I just ... cawn’t ... stick it!”
“Bo!” his wife screamed.
The boy’s. mouth opened, a dark wash of terror shadowed his vision of the bare yard and the sharp angle of shade. “Don‘t, Pa!”
The rocklike figure of his father
never moved. The thick finger squeezed down slowly, there was a thin, sharp report, and the sparrow jerked and collapsed into a shapeless wad on the ground. In the instant of the shot all its clean outlines vanished. Head, feet, the white breast, the perceptible outlines of the folded wings, disappeared all at once, crumpled together and were lost, and the boy sat beside his father on the step with the echo of the shot thin in his ears.
He did not look at either of his parents. He looked only at the crumpled sparrow. Step by step, unable to keep away, he went to it, stooped, and picked it up. Blood stained his fingers, and he held the bird by the tail while he wiped the smeared hand on his overalls. He heard the click as the bolt was shot and the empty cartridge ejected, and he saw his mother come swiftly out of the house past his father, who sat still on the step. Her hands were clenched, and she walked with her head down.
“Ma!” the boy said dully. “Ma, what’ll I do with it?”
She stopped and turned, and for a moment they faced each other. He saw the dead pallor of her face, the burning eyes, the not-quite-controlled quiver of her lips. But her words, when they came, were flat and level, almost casual.
“Leave it right there,” she said. “After while your father will want to hang it on the barbed wire.”
The boy dropped it and went straight away, as if by inspiration, to run his trap line. He hated his father and he would not even stay in the same yard with him, and he hated him all up through the pasture and back along the north end of the wheat field where the grain drooped in the withering sun. The wind, by the time he got back to the house toward evening, was blowing quite strongly from the southwest.
5
So the year that began in hope ended in bitterness. The rains that came after the blistering winds were ironic and unwanted, the crop was ruined, the prospect of a hard winter was there again, like an old unwelcome acquaintance come upon around a corner.
For the boy, the farm was spoiled. The reservoir had dried up almost completely, and now was a smelly, hoof-pocked, muddy hole. The creek by Pete and Emil was almost as bad. The trapping had palled, and the smell of his almost-two thousand tails when he opened the cigar box filled the sleeping porch and sickened him. There was no water for drowning gophers out, he had no more cartridges for shooting at hawks. And one night, in a blustering wind, the weasel’s cage got tipped over and the weasel got away.
Everything was stale. Because his father went down to Cree three or four times a week now and spent all afternoon talking with other lost and prowling homesteaders, there were practically no trips to the store any more. The only thing that saved him from empty moping was the advent of the Fall Sears Roebuck catalogue and the coming of the thresher crew to rescue the remnants of the wheat.
But then nothing again, the lackluster hours of hanging on the pasture gate and looking south toward the Bearpaws, without pleasure particularly, without longing, without anything but a dull wish that they’d go into town pretty soon.
“What’s the matter, son?” his mother said to him. “You go around looking like a lost soul.”
“I don’t know,” he said. He ran a finger up the rough face of a stud behind the sofa where he lay, got a sliver under the nail, and listlessly pulled it out again. “When we going into town, Ma?”
“Right away, soon as Pa can get the rest of the wheat hauled. You anxious to get back?”
“Uh huh. I guess so.”
“Oh Lord,” she said. “Me too. The change would do us all good.”
Then his father came back from his trip with the wagon crews, so bitter that he wouldn’t even say how much he had got for the little wheat the winds had left him, and the morning after that he said they were going to get out of this God-forsaken buffalo-chip flat as quick as they could pack.
They worked all that day stowing in the bed of the wagon quilts, clothes, odds and ends of furniture needed in town, spare cans of gasoline and kerosene, some sacks of wheat saved for chicken and cow feed. The wagon box was more than level full when they went in to supper, and when the boy went to bed that night and lay thinking about the loaded wagon outside, the trip coming up tomorrow, the excitement of town again, school again, Chet again, the house in town and the river and the brush and Hallowe‘en again, it seemed to him that the lonesome whining of the wind through the sleeping-porch screen, the lonesome slatting of a half-unrolled canvas curtain, had in them all that frightened and depressed him about the homestead. It was so big outside, the stars so high and cold, the land so flat and mysterious lying still as a shadow-earth under the remote sky. You could go out in the yard and stare in every direction and never see a light unless one of the few neighbors within five miles was out in the yard with a lantern, or an infrequent car was moving on the Cree road, and then it was almost worse than seeing no light at all, because it was such a faint lost glimmer that it spread the horizons further than ever and deepened instead of lightening the loneliness of wind and dark and stars and empty prairie.
And tomorrow would be the fifty-mile trip in, Gadke’s and the horse pasture and the Frenchman‘s, La Pointe’s, and all the kids peeking around the stone foundations of the barn, and then there would be the south bench, the dipping of the road that angled down into the flat river valley, and below them the green belt of willows crooked as a snake-trail in sand, the dull glitter of the river and the folded brown draws down the north bench opposite, and then the town, almost a hundred houses, dozens of kids, greetings and late shivery swims and playing run sheepy run again, and hare and hounds through the river brush.
Before daylight he was awakened by his father’s swearing and stamping around in the other room. He lay listening. The stove had run out of kerosene, and all the spare coal oil was packed far down under the mass of household goods in the wagon. The boy got out of bed and dressed swiftly, not wanting to be yelled at for oversleeping on a busy morning. But the morning was pretty well spoiled. Pa had got up on the wrong side of bed.
The sun was not yet up, and the prairie outside lay gray and desolate. He turned from the screen and went into the other room, hardly responding to his mother’s good morning. There was a dull and dispirited weight on his mind. He couldn’t wake up properly, and his mouth kept opening in jaw-cracking yawns.
His father came inside with the kerosene can, saw him standing there stupidly, and told him sharply to do something, for God sake. Did he think the world moved on wheels to get his breakfast and carry him into town? Go up and get the horses.
He went sullenly in the gray light, searching the corners of the pasture for the outlines of the team. In the east light grew, and turning his head he saw the pearly band along the horizon touched with rose. He stumbled in a badger hole and cursed like his father, kicking the mounded earth.
When he returned with the team, breakfast was on the table and his mother was already eating. His father was frying slices of bread in bacon fat. The boy slid into his chair, and his father turned to glower at him. “Have you washed?”
“No,” the boy said sullenly. At the bench outside, in the full rosy light, he dabbed his face and hands and threw out the water. The sun’s glaring saucer slipped over the flat horizon and touched him. That, and the dash of cold water on his face, made him feel better. The headachy feeling he had waked up to, the sort of feeling he had when a bilious spell was coming on, was almost gone. In a little while, his mind said, they would be heading for Whitemud, and that would be fine.
“Are we going to leave right after breakfast, Mom?” “I am. I’m going to start with the wagon, and you and Pa are going to finish up here and then you’re coming in the car.”
The boy looked toward the stove. His father’s dark face, even in profile, looked grouchy, dissatisfied, mad. “Ma, I want to go with you.”
“I’m afraid you can‘t,” she said. “Pa needs you to help him.” She smiled at him, squinting her eyes and warning him, reminding him —not to make a fuss, not to whine, not to get Pa’s temper started. He understood her look but he fussed anyw
ay. The prospect of riding all the way with his father was suddenly dreadful to him.
“Well, I want to!” he said. “I want to go in the wagon with you.”
“You do as you’re told,” his father said, and slapped another slice of bread into the pan. The boy sat pouting, accusing his mother silently. She had betrayed him. Her face was weary as she reached out to pat his hand.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t get very far before you catch me. You can change off then.”
He was carrying old boards up to the house for shuttering when his mother climbed into the wagon seat atop the monstrous load and gathered up the lines. He dropped the boards and ran to open the gate, and as the wagon went through with his father walking at the wheel his mother smiled down at the boy and blew him a kiss off the ends of her heavy gloves. She looked so funny up there with a straw hat on that he laughed.
“Don’t try to hurry it,” his father said. “You’ve got a heavy load and a colt along. Let the team make its own speed. We’ll probably catch you the other side of the horse pasture somewhere.”
“All right.” Sitting on her high seat, she smiled down on them. “‘Bye, son.” Her eyes went back to the little round-topped shack on the other side of the coulee, and she stood up to raise an arm. “So long, homestead,” she said. “We’ll be back!” She met Bo’s eyes briefly, held them, and flapped the lines over the horses. The laden wagon creaked heavily, rocking through the burnouts. A hundred feet away she turned and waved, and the boy waved back, mechanically, watching the wagon crawl into the blazing east.