Red Dog, Red Dog

The house where I was born and died nudged up against Ranch Road. No whisper of smoke lifted from the chimney. The day had been hot, the doors and windows shut tight as Mother waited alone at the kitchen table, gazing at the mountain. A thin breeze came in the window off the lakes and hills. For me there was no heat, no sleep, no cool of night. Swallows flew through me; Sulphur butterflies fluttered through my eyes and out my mouth.

I told Nettie to quiet. Her spirit was seething still. She was Mother’s mother and she’d told me yet again how Elmer Stark came to the farmhouse out in Saskatchewan following on the heels of her daughter who’d stopped him on the grid road and asked him to come in and share their evening meal, a flirty girl at the fence line watching the road for a man. Nettie told me how she regarded this man, younger than her and older than her daughter, his hands resting on the kitchen table, the large knuckles and the burnished hairs on the backs of his fingers and hands, the curl of his red hair, wet with sweat, stubbled out over the collar of the blue cotton shirt she’d given him after he washed at the sink, one of the two shirts of her husband’s she’d kept in the trunk in the bedroom chiffonier.

She told me how she’d stood, gripping the back of a kitchen chair while he washed, his naked shoulders, the gleam of his skin, and the lines of charred bronze where the sun had burned his neck and wrists, the faint red-gold of the hairs that edged from under his belt at his waist. Nettie had wanted to brush against them, feel that softness on her wrists, her belly. She’d not touched nor been touched by a man in the years since her husband hanged himself, leaving her and her young daughter, Lillian, alone on the farm. Now her daughter was seventeen and had spent the spring and summer afternoons at the window or standing at the fence line looking out along the grid road that led down from Prince Albert and up from Fort Qu’Appelle.

Nettie had stood with her back to the same window with its flour-sack curtains she’d dyed orange with willow bark and chokecherries. She told me how her daughter sat at the kitchen table and watched the man she’d brought in from the correction line. Nettie said she knew her daughter thought she was the only woman in the room, her mother to her a dry leaf, a forgotten stone. They both gazed at his naked back and the hairs leading like a wedge of late-summer wheat down under his brown, sweat-stained leather belt.

She stood there and watched her daughter suddenly become a woman. Her own need was heat between her legs.

As Nettie quiets, gone back to brooding, Elmer shouts into the dirt, his story blundering among the roots. He starts in again about the sister he left behind south of the land of the little sticks, the mother who stared into his back as he walked away, knowing what would happen when his father woke. Elmer said nothing to her when she gave him a bag with a part-loaf of day-old bread, a turnip, five eggs in a jar of vinegar, and strips of smoked venison she’d had hidden away. He’d rolled an extra shirt in a scrap of blanket along with three fish hooks, fish leader wound on a stick, and his father’s short knife stripped from his father’s belt as he lay sleeping. The sheath was stained with sweat, a salt line running like a lake edge across the leather. What was there to say but that he had to go, the bruise on his cheek a mottled blue from his father’s back-handed fist thrown at him when he’d forgotten to tie up the dog. His father had been herding cattle into the pen and the dog had spooked the stock, half the steers veering off and gone into the dusk, not to be found till the next day, and then that fist again, hard across the side of his head, Elmer calling to the dog to come back, all to no avail.

The fist was nothing to what his father did three hours later when he finished a jar of moonshine, hauling him out into the bull pasture and beating him as he cursed his son. His sister, Alice, the one I was named for, had burst from the kitchen door and run across the stubble field. She had begged her father to stop, but he wouldn’t listen. Elmer found out Alice was gone when he woke up in his cot in the lean-to at the back of the house. His mother was washing the cuts in his skin. She knew where Alice was and so did Elmer. She was where he always took her, out past the barn to the empty grain shed beyond the dugout.

Elmer had lain awake in the lean-to until he heard the early howl of a coyote. The moon was gone and the hours were running to the dawn. Alice wasn’t back, his father sleeping loud behind the half-wall that separated their bed from the kitchen.

What about Alice?

His whisper to his mother. She squatted beside him and told him not to fear, that his sister would be back later in the morning when father fetched her. Elmer looked at the chapped skin on her hands as she gave him a pair of his father’s old boots and a can with a skim of dubbin in the grooves. Take care of your boots, she’d said. They’ll save your feet on the road. She told him he had to go north before he could go south. Leave the road, she said. He’ll try to find you. Follow the creek. The creek leads to the river and the river leads to people. Remember that. Follow the upstream. The Saskatchewan River will find you a home.