A Hard Witching Read online

  A few years after Grandpa died, she told me she’d known him almost a year before she was aware he had a brother.

  “Your grandpa had come down to see me once,” she said, “just after he bought that car, that awful old thing, and he said, ‘Ludie, I think I’ll take a ride over to Medicine Hat next week, if you want to come.’ We were engaged by then, of course, so I said, ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ and he said, ‘I guess there’ll be room for both of us with Aloise,’ and I said, ‘Aloise? Who’s Aloise?’ and he just looked around a bit and then he said, ‘My brother.’”

  III

  Grandpa had never shared Uncle Aloetius’ penchant for collecting, but he occasionally joined him on his meandering walks through the Sand Hills north of town or in the deep, stratified coulees of the river hills. If Max and I happened to be visiting, we were expected to participate. Though we hated those long, hot, agonizingly boring walks, whether through the Sand Hills or the river hills, we always chose the Sand Hills if consulted. For one reason, there were no rattlers, curled like fat grey muscles behind rocks and beneath ground cedar, and no bull snakes either, which, though harmless (as Grandpa continually pointed out), could startle us both into tears by appearing suddenly in the sagebrush at our feet, long and black and thick as a man’s arm. For another, the Sand Hills were full of chokecherries and saskatoons, and we could sit on the great flesh-coloured dunes, writing our names with sticks and letting the hot, soft sand squish up between our toes, pretending to be marooned on a desert island, pretending the dry, rolling scrubland for miles around us was all water. We could pick bunches of wild rose, which smelled faintly of apples, and scurf-pea and orange sand dock to take home to our grandmother, and if we were lucky, we might see a bush hare or a buck or even a mule deer and her fawn feeding in the small shade of aspen bluffs. Usually, though, we were not allowed to wander off by ourselves or sit alone under that vast blue sky, but were expected to keep pace with my grandfather and Uncle Aloetius, who, much to our dismay, did not walk on the dunes at all. They preferred to poke through the brush, where we were subjected to the awful zinging of grasshoppers against our bare legs and arms and faces and where, as Uncle Aloetius claimed, we were more likely to find some good thing: antelope prongs bleached white by the sun or petrified snail shells or even a Clovis point.

  “What’s a Clovis point, anyway?” Max asked me one day—in that last summer before Uncle Aloetius died—as we minced along behind him, eyes glued to the ground, ever wary of a chance rattler that may have found its way up from the river hills, or of other terrible discoveries: a dead kangaroo rat or a salamander or simply cow shit.

  “An arrowhead,” I said, “I think.”

  Grandpa was off to the side a few feet, but Uncle Aloetius looked at us over his shoulder.

  “About yay big.” He held up his thumb. “Shaped,” he said, “like your tongue.”

  Max felt his tongue.

  “But chipped around the base, like so. For hunting.” He raised his arms in an absurd gesture meant, we assumed, to denote great size. “Voolly mammet.”

  “Really?” Max said. “Woolly mammoths?”

  “Yah.” Uncle Aloetius nodded. “Ten thousand years old. More.” He stopped walking and turned to stare out across the field. “They used to be all over here.” He swung his walking stick through the air. “Before that,” he said, “it was all ice. There was nothing.”

  Max looked at him in disbelief. “Where did it go, all the ice?”

  Uncle Aloetius shrugged. “Melted. Dried up. Ran away. Now there’s just the river.”

  “And buffalo?” Max asked. “Was there buffalo?”

  “That was later.” Uncle Aloetius scowled, though you could see he was pleased. “Thousands of years. Prehistoric times. There’s rubbing stones still. In the glacial tillage.” He stopped and frowned down at us. “You know what that is?”

  “Yeah,” Max said, “sure.”

  I glared at him.

  “And teepee rings,” Uncle Aloetius said, walking again. “It took seven, eight buffalo hides to make a teepee. Cartilage to sew it together. Bones and hooves to make glue. The stomach for a water pouch. Or a cooking pot. They wasted nothing,” he added proudly, as if it had all been under his personal supervision.

  “What did they use the heart for?” Max asked.

  “They ate it,” he said, “of course. Same as kow harst.”

  I grimaced at Max, ready to band in solidarity against the detested cow heart Grandma sometimes sliced, breaded and fried at Grandpa’s or Uncle Aloetius’ request. But he had trotted ahead to walk abreast of Uncle Aloetius. Grandpa stopped a few feet away.

  “It was a special treat, buffalo heart,” Uncle Aloetius said, “for an honoured brave. Or some favoured member of the tribe.”

  “They ate it?” Max asked.

  “Didn’t I just say so?”

  “Raw,” Max asked, “or cooked?”

  Grandpa walked over, took the canteen Uncle Aloetius carried slung across his shoulder. “When we were young,” he interrupted, taking a big swig of water, “we used to come out here for fun, eh, Aloise?” He pointed to the highest of the dunes, which rose maybe fifteen metres or so above us. “We’d bring boards,” he said, “and slide down.”

  “In the winter?” I asked.

  “Summer, too,” he said. “Or we’d just roll down. We’d roll the girls down. Like barrels. Remember that? They would scream.”

  Uncle Aloetius nodded.

  “They would tie their skirts like so between their knees and we would roll them down and they would scream. They’d come up with sand in their hair and in their mouths. And laugh. Then we’d have a fire, maybe. Aloise,” he said, “remember? Remember Eleanor Gutbergen? Huh?”

  Uncle Aloetius shrugged.

  Grandpa tipped his head toward Uncle Aloetius. “He remembers. All those girls, Eleanor Gutbergen. They all chased him. He was always the favourite.”

  Uncle Aloetius said nothing, just kept jabbing that stick around, turning over rocks, lifting branches of sage and ground cedar.

  “We had fun times out here, eh, Aloise?”

  “Did you ever find a Clovis point?” Max asked.

  “Go.” Grandpa nodded toward the dune. “Roll down. It’s fun.”

  Max and I looked at each other.

  “Go on,” he said, smiling, though his voice sounded angry for some reason. “Try it.”

  Max and I walked slowly toward the dune, the sun beating down heavily on our heads. I touched the top of my hair. It was hot.

  “Go on,” Grandpa said.

  Max started up the hill, leaning forward, using his hands against the incline for balance, his feet sinking to the ankles in sand. I looked down at my short skirt. It would be impossible to tie it between my knees, and I became furious suddenly that I had not worn shorts. I glanced back to see whether Grandpa would force me to go, but he was shading his eyes, peering up at Max, silhouetted now by the sun. Uncle Aloetius stood next to him, looking up also. And it occurred to me that neither of them would care whether I went up or not.

  “Okay,” Grandpa said when Max was poised at the top of the dune. “Just lay down and roll. Keep your arms straight at your sides.”

  For a moment, I thought Max would do it—it seemed as though he would. But then he just stood there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Grandpa called up, “it won’t kill you. It’s sand. The girls used to do it.”

  Max scratched the back of his arm.

  “Did Grandma ever do it?”

  “Grandma?” Grandpa said. “How the hell should I know? Probably.”

  Max stared down at us.

  “Did Aunt Cherry?”

  I started at the sound of that rarely heard name, surprised that Max would say it. Grandpa opened his mouth, snapped it shut. Uncle Aloetius kept looking up at Max as if he hadn’t heard, or hadn’t cared. Max stood at the top of the dune, waiting.

  “Oh, for Christ
’s sake,” Grandpa said again, but more quietly now. “Walk down, then.”

  Max hesitated, then scrambled down the hill, sliding most of the way, the sand rushing before him in a smooth, hot sheet. When he reached the bottom, I whispered, “Why’d you say that? Why’d you bring up Aunt Cherry?” But he just walked over to Uncle Aloetius and asked, “What colour was it? The Clovis point?”

  Grandpa frowned. “We should get back, not?”

  “Yah.” Uncle Aloetius shrugged. “If you want to get back.”

  “No, Grandpa,” Max said, “let’s look for a Clovis point. We can find one, I bet.”

  Grandpa shook his head. “We should get back,” he said, and without waiting for the rest of us started walking to where the car sat white and shimmering in the heat, like a bone.

  IV

  Of Aunt Cherry, Max and I knew little. We had glimpsed a photograph of her in Uncle Aloetius’ bedroom, but for obvious reasons had never lingered over it. There were two others in my grandmother’s album. The first was a rather distant shot of a bride and groom standing solemnly on the steps of the Catholic church in town. They were both frowning a little, perhaps at the sun, and held their arms straight at their sides, Cherry’s plastic bouquet half covered by the white dress that flared out a little at her knees. The only indication they were even aware of each other’s presence was their shoulders pressed firmly together. Underneath, my grandmother had written in neat blue pencil, Cherry and Aloetius.

  Next to that photograph was another of the two of them, but this time with my grandfather, almost unrecognizable in a clean white shirt and suspenders, a fedora cocked to one side over his unhandsome face. He lounged easily between them, an arm slung across each of their shoulders, his mouth partway open. Uncle Aloetius stood almost as solemn as before—as though bearing all my grandfather’s weight in that arm—except that something in his face had relaxed. Not a smile, not quite, but the closest thing to it I’d ever seen on Uncle Aloetius. On this younger man, this boy, thin and pale in his dark suit, that smile made any relation to the man we knew—the man of the gout and the suspenders and the walking stick—all but inconceivable. Yet something in the young man’s expression was unaccountably Uncle Aloetius, some element of anxiety, as if nothing light came easily to him. In that photograph, he reminded me sometimes of Max, though I couldn’t have said why, and I didn’t like the parallel. Some tension in the line of the jaw, perhaps, nothing more. Serious, even on his wedding day. It made me wonder, had he never been happy?

  Cherry was something else entirely. In the second photograph, she had turned halfway around, her teeth bared in what looked to be a laugh, as though Grandpa had just said something tremendously funny. The hand that held the bouquet had blurred now, being raised or lowered, we couldn’t tell. Three other people were in the photograph, anonymous people, two men, and a woman in a frumpy knee-length dress and a hat with a veil. But they stood rigidly, staring straight ahead. At first, we’d thought the woman was Grandma, but she’d said, “No, I didn’t know your grandpa then. That was before my time.”

  A dog had wandered into the frame, too, his head and front leg just visible in the foreground, tongue lolling in a crazy grin. Max said it must have been Grandpa’s dog; he could tell by how the dog was looking right at Grandpa. But I didn’t see how Max could tell that. The dog could have been looking at any one of them, at no one. The top corner of the snapshot had been torn away, just a chunk of sky, the edge of a cottonwood tree, that was all. Beneath this photograph my grandmother had written simply, With Mattias.

  V

  The morning we heard Uncle Aloetius was dead, Max and I were out in the garden picking what would certainly be the last of the peas, the plants still cool and swollen with the night air, and Uncle Aloetius—as far as we knew—still across town smoking happily, or at least not unhappily, in the old leatherette recliner on his front porch, cap tipped far back on his head the way he always wore it and a thermos of Nescafé between his knees. It was late August, and the sun had already bleached the edges of leaves and baked the earth too solid for a hoe. Grandpa came over from the neighbours’, hauling their Rototiller, ready to till up the pea plants when we had finished. He scooped a handful of pods from the metal bucket and unzipped one, dragging the peas out in one smooth motion with his thumb.

  “Eat some,” he said. “They put hair on your chest.”

  The phone rang in the kitchen, and Grandpa asked us if we knew how to make a peapod into a whistle, and Grandma came to the back door and stood barefoot on the edge of the steps, frowning at us as if she had forgotten something, and Grandpa dropped the empty pods and walked over, but only halfway, and they just looked at each other, their hands hanging motionless at their sides, with the morning’s first cabbage butterflies like tissue paper everywhere and the cool green smell of peapods.

  And then Grandma said, “Aloetius.”

  Grandpa stood there a bit longer.

  “What is it?” Max said.

  “Come.” Grandma waved us in through the screen door. We went to stand by the window, and Grandma came up behind us, said, “Leave him alone now.” But she watched too, a hand on each of our shoulders, as Grandpa fired up the Rototiller and began plowing through the garden, not just through the peas but through unharvested pumpkin and squash and rows of corn. Max and I looked at each other and then at our grandmother, her mouth settled into its usual puzzling calm.

  “Grandma,” Max said, “what’s wrong?”

  But she just sighed and lifted her shoulders a little.

  “Someone should go out there, I guess,” she said, finally. “Before he does something foolish.”

  VI

  “I guess you’ll call Cherry,” my grandmother said that evening at supper, after phone calls had been placed to relatives and arrangements made for Uncle Aloetius’ funeral. She said it evenly, as if it were a fact, but from the way she looked at Grandpa, Max and I could tell it was a question. “She’ll want to come back,” she added.

  We were eating much later than was typical with our grandparents, the sun already at that point of descent when its power seemed unbearable. It was hot in the kitchen. On any other day, we might have filled our plates and sat in the shade on the back steps, listening to the after-supper sounds of lawn mowers and children and dishes clinking against each other through the open windows of our neighbours’ kitchens. But this day we stayed at the table, as if in some sort of penance, our legs sticking to the vinyl of our chairs.

  Grandpa mashed at his boiled potatoes, shook salt liberally over everything and began to eat without looking up. Grandma wiped her brow with a tea towel and took her seat. She picked up her fork, put it down, picked it up again. Max and I exchanged a glance across the table.

  “Still in Thunder Bay.” Grandma took a bite and chewed in that slow, careful way of hers, as though everything were riddled with fish bones. “From what I hear.”

  Thunder Bay. I loved the exotic, stormy sound of it, mouthed it quietly to myself, feeling the weight of it on my tongue. I imagined waves spraying a black shore, great pointed pines, wolves. I imagined lightning, brush fires sparked, then smothered, by the wild unpredictability of weather. I imagined smoke. Cherry; yes, if your name was Cherry, you would live in Thunder Bay. You would stand on the rocks, watching the storm roll in, rain whipping at your hair. You would have strong, beautiful hands. You would not, you could not, be married to a man like Uncle Aloetius.

  Grandpa looked up, scowling into the sun that pounded through the kitchen window. “Pull that damn blind,” he said to me.

  I laid my fork carefully by my plate and got up, lifting my chair rather than scraping it against the linoleum as I usually did. Outside, a flock of noisy sparrows had gathered, shrieking and flapping over what remained of the garden. The tilled plants had already lost their greenness, lay wilted and browning in the heat, ears of corn rotting in their sleeves. There will be rats, I thought with a shiver, we’ll get rats now.

  No one had menti
oned the garden since that morning, not since Grandma had said, “Someone should go out there, I guess.” Max and I had watched from the window while Grandma, barefoot still, stepped steadily across the green swaths and pulled the key on the Rototiller. When the engine coughed itself out, Grandpa turned on her. “Job foya mutt,” he snarled. Damn you to mud.

  But Grandma just stood there, and so he muttered, “Es nutzt dich nicht,” knowing she would not understand, using that ugly awful language against her, as he did when he was angry sometimes, against all of us. But it was nothing this time. Mind your own business. That was all. And Grandma said something back—we could see her lips move—but neither Max nor I could hear her. Maybe Grandpa couldn’t either because he kept staring at her until she turned around, the key to the Rototiller wrapped in her palm. She walked back to the house, lifting one soiled foot and then the other across the swaths, bending only once to collect the metal bucket of peas that Max and I had left behind in the sun, as if that was her only reason for going out there in the first place.

  The key (though, oddly, not the Rototiller) had been returned to the neighbours’, and the bucket stood now in the cool of the back porch, the peas waiting to be shelled, blanched, packed in clear plastic bags labelled neatly with the date on a strip of masking tape and frozen. They would be, I knew. Work was not left undone at my grandparents’, not for anything. Nothing was wasted. And I wondered, when they ate those peas next winter, when Grandma pulled the bag from the freezer, would she see that date and think of this day, this one long day?

  “Sit down,” she said now behind me. “Finish eating.” I returned quietly to the table.

  “I have Cherry’s number,” she said to Grandpa, “unless she’s moved.” She paused, watching as Grandpa raised his coffee mug. “But I don’t think so. She would be there still, I think.”