

THE SHORT PROSE WORK BY ROBERT KROETSCH: RE-IMAGINING ALBERTA

A reader, whose habits of perception and evaluation have been conditioned by conventional forms and techniques of poetry, I have been shocked on encountering the new frontiers of frontierlessness of the poetics of the postmodern Canadian author Robert Kroetsch, who seems to be struggling to capture in words the ineffable, the indeterminable and the unidentifiable. I deem it a creative shock, as it has thawed the indolence of complacency and pushed me out of the world of conditioned assents, hypothesis and contingency into a world of unsettling quest. I do not intend to indulge in superstitious veneration or envious malignity, but wish to hold a mirror upto the reactions generated in me on my critically self-conscious encounter with the postmodernist work of Robert Kroetsch, whose literary personality seems to elude final definition.

"Like the resourceful Coyote of Plains Indian Mythology, a figure central to his imagination, Robert Kroetsch is difficult to trap"1. He throws away the tight-lipped traditions of social realism and defies the restrictions of conventional forms, as he endeavours in his poetry to discover the 'I', the real being beneath the mirrored images of perception and a form through the metamorphosis of the formless.

In Robert Kroetsch we find a "historical transition...from a literature which assumed that it was imitating an order to a literature which assumes that it has to create an order, unique and self-dependent, and possibly attainable only after a critical process called 'decreation'" 2. He throws away the static ordered mythopoeic world view, which finds its expression in ritualised forms, which has been given literary application in conventional forms. He tries to capture the chaotic dynamism of the complex realities of the world, employing thematic and technical devices like self-reflexivity, sub-version or de-idealisation, de-centering, irony, parody, indeterminacy, generic paradoxes and mock-seriousness. These thematic and technical devices testify beyond doubt and dispute that Robert Kroetsch is a postmodernist poet.

The focus of his poetics is story. In an early conversation with Margaret Laurence he states his most often quoted sentence: "In a sense, we haven't got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real."3, indicating the important relationship between story and identity. In his famous 1982 conversations with Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson, Kroetsch further discusses his obsession with story. As a writer, Kroetsch is interested in the way he can use stories to communicate and connect to place, the incredible new place he calls Alberta.4 Thus, apart from story and selfhood, place is another category around which Kroetsch's poetics revolves. Kroetsch further explains in the interview that our real problem is how to deal with a new experience in a new place. Another problem in a new place is to find a new form to use, and that's why he kept trying different forms throughout his literary career. He poses a question "How do you live in this new country", a question that parallels a set of similar questions that he raised in his poem _Seed Catalogue_ (1977).

Robert Kroetsch has shown evident interest in the naked and primary problems of the poetic form. This is conspicuously perceptible in _The Ledger_ (1975) and _Seed Catalogue_. His poems seem to be an epiphany of the problematic relations between language and selfhood.

He has fed his and his people's experiences into the smithy of his alchemising genius. There they have been transmuted. The apparently unfinished products reveal his self and the corporate self of his people. In the introduction to _Seed Catalogue_ Kroetsch says that it is an 'ongoing poem', whereby he artfully implies the suggestive parallel between self and poem. Each individual poem is the suggestive analogy of an individual self. Each anthology becomes an implicit parallel to the corporate self of his people. He becomes acclaimed as a postmodernist, when we find multiplicity of implications in the same parallels. Each individual poem can be interpreted as the parallel to individual life. The anthology, which he epithetises as an 'ongoing poem' becomes the suggestive symbol of the ongoing phenomenon of life. He seems to be struggling to capture the protean forms of life, reality and self in the protean forms of language.

In _The Ledger_ and _Seed Catalogue_ the 'I' figures prominently. But the 'I' in these poems conforms to Kroetsch only superficially, because we find here only a hooded self. But what leaps off the pages and grapples our attention is the search for an adequate language and the quest for an authentic self. This elusive theme is central to both _The Ledger_ and _Seed Catalogue_. They contain a veiled examination of the poet's own family's past and his seeking after the personal source. The search for the past and self become incidentally the search for form and language. It is important in this context to note what he declares in _How I Joined the Seal Herd_ : "I am / writing this poem with my life"5. He wants us to understand the absurdity in any notion of that life "as the book of final entry / in which a record is kept"6.

The double entry, the double column printing of much of the poetry in _The Ledger_ implies the paradox in the attempt to find a balanced account of oneself. We find Kroetsch involved in the double-sided tale of construction and deconstruction as he enters _The Ledger_. He gives us the shocking realisation that the entries seldom balance. Wherever he looks, he finds holes. He finds "some pages torn out / by accident"7. He tries to fill up by imagining absences. He declares that everything he writes is a search, "a search for the dead", "for some pages remaining". _The Ledger_ becomes the record of his inward journey to his past. He doesn't find his past. He finds only the act of finding. This finding is disquieting, thematically and technically, which transforms _The Ledger_ into a symbol of the metamorphic nature of language and the elusive protean forms of reality. Each entry becomes an ambiguity, Kroetsch, who seeks adequate voice and utterance is caught in a disputed territory, a slippery ground between affirmation and negation - "Yes: no / no: yes"8. He tosses us between the columns in _The Ledger_ , knocks away notions, causes confusions and then compels us to emerge with new thoughts and to fill the gaps in his text intelligently.

_The Ledger_ evokes ancestral voices, which Kroetsch tries to record. In trying to record the ancestral voice, he attempts to speak. His attempt to speak becomes the unstable dialogue between the reality and the rendering, between the fact and the interpretation. In _The Ledger_ we find memory interacting with a document of the past. Memory engages itself in seeking the source. Kroetsch calls this a 'dream of origins'. It is the seedbed of song which he describes in his _Seed Catalogue_ :

"His muse is

His muse/if

memory is

and you have

no memory then

no meditation." 9

The interaction between memory and the document of the past is a baffling transformation of ambiguities. Yet ambiguities remain unresolved. This interaction which is essential to the inner journey, is recorded in _The Ledger_. Kroetsch acknowledges its effect upon the Orphic passion of eloquence and loss. The alchemising effect of the Orphic passion is seen when it transforms the very silence of death into magniloquence:

"everything you write

my wife, my daughters, said

is a search for the dead" 10

Conspicuously there is indeterminacy in the search, in the finding and in the form in which these two are recorded, and there emerges the elusive literary identity of Kroetsch as a postmodernist.

Robert Kroetsch who attempts to deconstruct the images of the records in the _The Ledger_ is a pure postmodernist. We find him trying to put back logs, which used for building the cabins of the early settlers, into "the original forests." His insistence on relieving the experience of "the confusion again/the chaos", on "marrying the terror" is quite evident. It is reflected in the language he uses. This descent into the destructuring element is recurrent in Kroetsch's works. _How I Joined the Seal Herd_ gives evidence of this. His flight back to the sea, which he honestly records in this poem, carries rich echoes and associations of this destructuring trend, which is characteristically postmodern.

The preoccupation with the inability of language in capturing and containing reality is a characteristic of postmodernism. The disquieting paradox of the defeat of language occurs in Kroetsch's writings. In _Seed Catalogue_ we get his stunning assertion: "We silence words/by writing them down."11

In _Seed Catalogue_ we get Kroetsch's dominant question: "How do you grow a poet?" The answer is implied in the seed time described in the poem. The seed time extends from his childhood to the present. If we want evidence of the postmodern technique of a meditation through memory upon the making of an imagination, the ten related sections of _Seed Catalogue_ offer it. The _Seed Catalogue_ is a metaphoric field. Here Kroetsch assembles the myths of seeding, decay and renewal. The poet seems to be preoccupied with a large conflict. The conflict is between the closed structures of the agrarian myths and the shamanistic role of the poet. For the shamanistic role he seems to prepare by adopting the techniques of innovation, elaboration and boundlessness. What is laudably remarkable is that his poetry is open in form. In _Seed Catalogue_ and _The Ledger_ there are no defined boundaries of genres. Prose fades into poetry gracefully and poetry weds prose in harmonious transfusion.

In _Seed Catalogue_ slightly varying questions are repeated: "But how do you grow a lover?" "How do you grow a prairie town?", "How do you grow a past....?, "But how do you grow a poet", "How do you grow a garden?". These variants are like the different coloured strands, which appear, disappear and reappear in the loom, finally emerging as a pattern. Here the pattern moves from the gardener to the garden. The flights of the lover and the poet complicate it. In this movement from the gardener to the garden, the mother's request: "Bring me the radish seeds" is repeated but evaded. It is noteworthy that her garden is the particular "locus" which stands in repudiation of the boundlessness of the hyperbolic story in _Seed Catalogue_. Normally the description of a garden assumes a halo of romance. Here it is divested of that. This we find even in the lack-lustre presentation of the image of a home place, which occurs in the first and last sections of _Seed Catalogue_ :

"No trees

around the house.

Only the wind.

Only the January snow.

Only the summer sun.

The home place:

a terrible symmetry."12

The mention of the double realm of winter and summer is in the postmodernist vein. It offers an enigma of identity. The postmodernist poet seeks a 'terrible beauty' through a 'terrible symmetry' of language.

"No. 176 - Copenhagen Cabbage:" This new introduction, strictly speaking, is in every respect a thoroughbred, a cabbage of highest pedigree, and is creating considerable flurry among professional gardeners all over the world. 13

Peter Thomas, who has done a deep study on the imaginative process of Kroetsch, which is as deceptive as Hemingway's allusive simplicity, tells us that in the lines given above we can find "the language of flight, expressing the wishful, hyperbolic dreams of winter kitchens". 14 The dreams of winter kitchens may be characteristically Canadian. But who else other than a postmodernist poet like Robert Kroetsch can present the hyperbolic dreams in the lustreless language of a piece of advertisement and yet make the description assume an unidentifiable grandeur? Normally we find poetry wrapped in the mist of metaphysical mystification. But here Robert Kroetsch divests poetry of that and he makes the muse embrace even the language of the advertiser and the accountant. "A tension between the language of acceptance and familiar meaning and that of storied enlargement is at work throughout _Seed Catalogue_ and remains intrinsic to Kroetsch's narrative methods elsewhere"15. In the second poem in _Seed Catalogue_ the language of the storied enlargement of the vegetable assumes a moral grandeur. The dry advertisement is spiced with a piece of preaching: "Virtue is its own reward." This provokes a sardonic laughter. In the characteristic postmodernist mode the poet makes us think as he provokes a laughter without mirth. An anti-song is characteristically postmodernist. In section 4 of _Seed Catalogue_ Kroetsch gives an anti-song, as he defines the town as a series of absences. There are no features of the personal or collective past in this town. Here through the postmodernist technique of negation Kroetsch effects paradoxically an affirmation. If we look for a deflationary story unravelled in unlyrical, sardonic, dislocated language, the following passage is sample enough:

"The Gopher was the model

Stand up straight:

telephone poles

grain elevators

church steeples

vanish, suddenly: the

gopher was the model." 16

In the seventh section of _Seed Catalogue_ we get a confessional note. Kroetsch describes a night out with A1 Purdy. Here we get the male/female imaginative tension. We find the demythifying hammer of the deconstructivist heavily banging at the hallowed myths of propriety and decorum. The concluding part of the section depicts the parable of male grain eloquence being punctured by a woman. The poetic genius of Kroetsch is found here involved in construction through deconstruction.

In the final two sections of _Seed Catalogue_ we find the consciousness of past and present appearing as an intricately woven pattern of recurrence. Kroetsch uses a startling metaphor from his family history. There are a 'terrible symmetry' and a stirring irony in his veiled allusion to the death of his cousin who died on a bombing mission over Cologne in 1943. He employs metaphors of planting and recurrence. The phrasal repetition enhances the effect:

''The danger of merely living.

a shell/exploding

in the black sky: a

strange planting

a bomb/exploding

in the earth: a

strange

man/falling

on the city

killed him dead."17

Conventional norms of poetic rhythm and symmetry of poetic language are exploded here. But the force of the images emerges through the unconventional lines.

Even conventional norms and concepts of propriety are shattered when the _'She'_ becomes "the holy shit mother" described in _Meditation on Tom Thomson_. The myths of Demeter and Aphrodite are deconstructed and then synthesized in the postmodernist deconstructivist mode. A new myth, ironically, emerges as Kroetsch describes the "holy shit mother". The elements of legendary awe around this myth as we find the "holy shit mother" sending forth her sons on Icarian flights of 'forgetfulness' and she herself remaining to guard memory and time.

In _Seed Catalogue_ we have the documentation of pieces of advertisement. But quite in the postmodernist mode, it assumes an aura of fancy: it moves into phantasy: it touches reality at poignant junctures.

In _The Ledger_ there is imaginative descent through time. Re-invited family past becomes the means for the imaginative descent. From the bounds of time and space, the descent is into a shamanistic dream song. Our acclamation of Robert Kroetsch as a postmodernist poet is justified as we critically analyse the characteristic concerns of Robert Kroetsch as a poet. We can recapitulate his characteristic concerns as : (1) the obsessive search for source, which he unravels in the _"dream of origins";_ (2) the duality of perception which he discloses in the double kingdom of winter/summer and in the male/ female hegemonies of underworld and vegetation; (3) the Orphic motif of descent, which he divulges in the motion of entry into chaos; (4) the structures of language of shamanistic dream. These thematic devices and technical peculiarities help us to ascertain the poetic identity of Robert Kroetsch as a postmodernist.

Kroetsch's contribution to postmodernism started with _boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature_ which he co-edited with William Spanos in the early 1970s. The journal featured literary criticism and creative writing and came into exitence as a reaction to the closure of boundaries produced by modern literature as Spanos explained in the interview18. A special issue of _boundary 2_ in 1974, A Canadian Issue, was dedicated to Canadian literary achievements in poetry and criticism. The issue was edited by Kroetsch himself, and though a talented novelist, he excluded fiction and short prose from the issue. Kroetsch's postmodern theories and essays were collected in _Labyrinths of Voice_ (1982) and in _The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New_ (1989). _The Lovely Treachery of Words_ included his postmodern manifesto "Unhiding the Hidden", first published in 1974, where he explained the significance of postmodernism for Canadian writers.

His obsession with place and his search for the garden and Eden, which is actually his home place Alberta, continues throughout his poems and prose works. Alberta is the place he keeps returning and in the interview to Neuman and Wilson he says: "The one place where I found a kind of open field was the garden because a garden is ambiguous on a farm"19. He considers himself a poet, a gardener who replants his home place in his imagination. His Eden is the Battle River where he grew up, but also his imaginary places Coulee Hill and Notikeewin that he mythologizes in his short stories and novels. Kroetsch's full recreation of the garden of Eden culminates in _The Words of My Roaring_ (1966) where he turns prairie into a lush garden with Helen Persephone as the central figure embodying bliss but also sin. He recreates Alberta to mythological dimensions so that it becomes his "magical kingdom, the centre of his imagination, a world he never left"20.

In the interview to Jefferson, Kroetsch gives one of his most complete defintions of place. For him place is "almost like clothing that you wear, it's even more than that, it's like your skin itself, place is a part of your body, and part of your mind, and we have to connect, if we don't connect with that place we are just aimless atoms floating around, ... we have to admit that it's a complicated connection we have with the landscape"21. By referring to this almost organic relationship with place and his native Alberta, Kroetsch finds the way how to understand Alberta, how to describe the indescribable which he can not capture in words. As he was away for years, his longing for home became his longing for language too because Alberta is not only the real place, it is also the place of his imagination.

Most of his poetic material was drawn from his home place which was his constant inspiration. The stories heard in Alberta beer parlours found their way into his short stories, novels, and poems. He claims that story, or myth, is generative22 opening up possibilities for new stories. It is "the act of telling the story that matters"23 and not the story itself. One and the same story can be told in different ways generating new and different meanings.

In reference to his poetic material, the new does not mean a new knowledge about the already given things and phenomena, but the sloughing off of the old false layers of meaning as well as the stereotypes in order to reach authenticity, while at the same time renouncing the already given mythological pattern and breaking down myths and stories into fragments. Kroetsch's canon is based on the story of an individual's struggle against the inherited social experience and inherited meanings which produce false interpretations. By way of a free combination of fragments and palimpsests, he creates new meanings different from the old ones codified by different patterns and frames. Kroetsch recreates old stories and fragments into new ones.

Kroetsch's first published short story _The Stragglers_ appeared in the April issue of _The Montrealer_ in 1950, while _The Toughest Mile_ came out in the November issue _._ Then came _That Yellow Prairie Sky_ in _Maclean's Magazine,_ 30 April, 1955. It was followed by _The Harvester_ and _Who Would Marry A Riverman?_ also published in _Maclean's Magazine_ in 1956. _Mrs. Brennan's Secret_ was published in _Maclean's_ too in 1957, and _The Blue Guitar_ in _The Canadian Forum_ in 1958, while _Defy the Night_ was published in _The University of Kansas City Review_ in 1960 and reprinted under the title _Earth Moving_ in _Stories From Western Canada_ in 1972. The publication of _Creation_ in 1970 included three stories: _Election_ _Fever_ , _Say Ah_ and _That Yellow Prairie Sky. Election Fever_ is the excerpt from _The Words of My Roaring_ and as such is not reprinted in this collection. _Say Ah_ was published as part of _Gone Indian_ (1973), but in a slightly different form. _That Yellow Prairie Sky_ is Kroetsch's first published full-length story as he explained in the interview with Margaret Laurence in _Creation_ 19. _Something Fishy In The Pool_ came out in _Toronto Life_ in 1978. _The Man in Winter Catalogue_ is a TV play and appeared in _Creation_ , while _Strip Poker_ appears for the first time in this collection.

The publication of the first short stories followed Kroetsch's pursuit of new experience in the north. He worked as a labourer on the Fort Smith Portage, then on the Mackenzie riverboats (the experience which he would use later for his novel _But We Are Exiles_ (1965) and in 1951 he went east to Winnipeg first, then to Churchill where he ran a company and spent three years working in Labrador. In 1954-55 he went to Montreal where he studied at McGill under Hugh MacLennan and intended to write a novel. Instead of a novel he wrote a short story "That Yellow Prairie Sky" about prairie farmers. He concludes his experience in the north the following way:

"After six years spent largely in the north I sat down in a room in Montreal to write a long novel. I wrote a short story called "Than Yellow Prairie Sky", a story about youth, and innocence, and crops, and weather – on the prairies where I grew up. Finally, I'd learned somethning about experience".24

In this story Kroetsch introduces the prairie as a character, explores the relationship between men and women living in the prairie, and shows how man can fall victim to weather and cosmic forces, the motifs that he would use later in his writing.

Kroetsch's characters in the stories experience difficulties and ordeals of living in the prairie so that their destinies remain "locked between dream and nightmare"25. This statement reflects the clash and the difference between the old and the new which Kroetsch explores in his fiction including the _Out West Triptych_. He anticipates his two visions of life: the apocalyptic vision and the nightmare of the harsh prairie reality, especially during draughts (the idea that he would focus on in _The Words of My Roaring)_ , and his visionary view of life, which he advocates, and which is based on a dream of possibility and change and of building up a better future where the promise of the fulfillment of dreams will be reality.

He continued to re-imagine Alberta into existence into his _Out West Triptych, The Words of My Roaring_ , _The Studhorse Man_ (1969), for which he won a Governor General's Award, and _Gone Indian_. _The Words of My Roaring_ and _The Studhorse Man_ give the rural portrait of Alberta in the twentieth century. _The Words of My Roaring_ is a novel about the elections during the Depression in the 1930s in Alberta, while _The Studhorse Man_ is a tale of Hazard Lepage roaming the prairies of Canada in quest for the perfect mare for his horse Poseidon. The story anticipates the incoming technological change and the replacement of rural values by urban values after the Second World War. _Gone Indian_ is about a U.S. student Jeremy Sadness going west to the frontier, to the Sasketchewan bush. _Gone Indian_ was followed by _Badlands_ (1975), another Alberta novel, about a woman's quest for dinosaur bones in the prairies and Badlands, while _What The Crow Said_ (1978), in which the author explores the possibilities of meaning, a novel where realism gives way to the fantastic, is about a printer and a talking crow inhabiting the city of Big Indian located on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Kroetsch's dedication to his native province resulted also in a travel book _Alberta,_ published in 1968, in which he gives his personal and objective account of the province.

By trying to capture and put prairie experience and landscape into fiction, Kroetsch mythologizes the prairie as the place of origin. As a westerner, his imagination responds first to possibility rather than to the past. Alberta is a country of possibility. He believes in the possibility to create anew, in the dream to be fulfilled. He sums up the western way of living:

"We took at this place, at these prairies, at this Alberta, and, to be poetic about it, we replace memory with desire. The popular name, next-year country, is not frightening to us. It is our shorthand name for a state of mind, a need, an obsession, a blind confidence, a desperate act of faith, a way of living"26.

By prophesying a new world, imagining his native Alberta, and turning predicament into potential in his stories and poetry, Kroetsch is a new creator dreaming the dream of what might be.

In _The Hornbooks of Rita K_ (2001), Kroetsch further explores his innovative and experimental approach to poetry. _The Hornbooks_ consists of poetical fragments about Rita K, the prairie poet who disappears misteriously one day from the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art. The author of the book is Raymond who lives on the prairies and who traces the life of his beloved Rita by way of the fragments she had left. Both Rita and Raymond appear as doubles of Robert Kroetsch, the poet and the scholar. Rita is both like and unlike Kroetsch. Like him, she travels all around the world lecturing and trying to write "an autobiography in which I do not appear"27. Unlike Kroetsch, she lives on a ranch in the Battle River Valley in Alberta. The book becomes Kroetsch's attempt to imagine himself as a poet and what might have been if he had not left his home. But like the missing Rita K or the missing poet from the text, this book of poetical fragments is about what is not rather than about what is. Or it is both about presence and absence. By tracing Rita's life, Raymond faces the dilemma:

"The question is always the question of trace,

What remains of what does not remain?"28

Raymond is Rita's lover, reader, archivist, who exchanges places with Rita, occupying her abandoned house, determining the relationship between self and other, poet and poem, reader and poem.

"We have made a small trade, you and I. I occupy your

abandoned house. Therefore, by your crystal logic, it is

who am missing from the world, not you. But surely it is,

always, the poet who is absent from the terrors of

existence, not the reader."29

By addressing "you" and "I", Raymond addresses the absent Rita both as the writer and the reader of his text. He also addresses us readers, who occupy the "abandoned house" of a poem or a story which the poet had left behind.

In _The Hornbooks_ , mediating on the function of art and poetry, the poet asks: "What's the poetic function of the hand?"30 and answers by asking another question: "Is not poetry a questing after place, a will to locate?"31 Kroetsch connects the function of poetry to a sense of place. His long poems _The Ledger_ and _Seed Catalogue_ are attempts to recreate his native place and home.

For Kroetsch, the poem is stored in memory. What we think and read and write is the memory of what was never made present or seen. The memory is the memory of trace, a fragment which makes poetry possible, the very possibility of life, for "to take poetry into one's hands is to take one's own life into one's hands"32. The possibility could be the trace of a 'dream of origins' or a 'local pride', or it could be the erasure and the absence because erasure constitutes the trace as trace, makes it like the snow that Rita admired, "disappear in its appearance"33, "disappear into art"34. The poet explains in _The Hornbooks_ :

"We turn to speak and confront an absence. Thus we

become, all of us, poets"35.

Kroetsch's attempt to decreate and recreate his home place is related to the memory of what had been and what had remained. His long poems and fiction comprise a kind of biographical and textual traces of the place of origin associated with the prairie where he grew up. His poems and stories are his memories about the home that had been and that can only exist in the present moment of memory, experience, and text.

August 2013 Tanja Cvetković

1Peter Thomas. Robert Kroetsch. (Vancouver : Douglas & Mcintyre, 1980): 1.

2 Frank Kermode. The Sense or an Ending (New York. Oxford University Press, 1967):167.

3 Robert Kroetsch. Creation. (Toronto: NewPress, 1970): 63.

4 Robert Kroetsch in an interview to John Jefferson, January 2008.

5 Robert Kroetsch. How I Joined the Seal Herd. in Field Notes. (Don Mills: General Publishing Co., 1981).

6 Robert Kroetsch. The Ledger. (London. Ontario: Applegarth Follies. 1975) (a)

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid. (b)

9 Robert Kroetsch. Seed Catalogue. in Field Notes. (Don Mills: General Publishing Co., 1981).

10 Robert Kroetsch. The Ledger (London. Ontario, Applegarth Follies. 1975) (a)

11 Robert Kroetsch. Seed Catalogue. in Field Notes. (Don Mills: General Publishing Co., 1981).

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Peter Thomas. Robert Kroetsch. (Vancouver: Douglas & Mcintyre. 1980):1.

15 Ibid. 25.

16 Robert Kroetsch. Seed Catalogue. in Field Notes. (Don Mills: General Publishing Co., 1981).

17 Ibid.

18 Spanos in George J. Searles. _Beyond the Boundary._ PDQ, November 1, 1974. University of Calgary Special Collections Library.

19 Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch.(Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1982): 21.

20Aritha Van Herk. Biocritical Essay. 1986. Available: <http://www.ucalgary.ca/library/speccoll/kroetschbioc.htm> Retrieved: July, 2001.

21 Kroetsch in an interview to Jefferson, January 2008.

22Robert Kroetsch. The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New.(Toronto:

Oxford University Press, 1989): 120.

23 Robert Kroetsch. Creation. (Toronto: NewPress, 1970): 53.

24 Robert Kroetsch. The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New.(Toronto:

Oxford University Press, 1989): 10-11.

25 Robert Kroetsch. Alberta. (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1993): 57.

26 Robert Kroetsch. "Turning Alberta Into Fiction". The Lethbridge Herald. Saturday, March 13, 1976. The University of Calgary Special Collections Library.

27 Robert Kroetsch. The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2001): 29.

28 Ibid. 8.

29 Ibid. 54.

30 Ibid. 31.

31 Ibid. 30.

32 Ibid. 45.

33 Jacques Derrida. Margins of Philosophy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 24.

34 Robert Kroetsch. The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2001): 40.

35 Ibid. 53.

## THE COLLECTION OF SHORT PROSE WORK

## BY ROBERT KROETSCH

### Edited by

Tanja Cvetković

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the University of Calgary Special Collections Library where I conducted my research. Thank you to Ms. Marlys Chevrefils for providing access to the archives and for helping me photocopy the material. Thanks to Professor Aritha Van Herk, University of Calgary, for discussions on how to put the manuscript together. My special thanks go to John Jefferson for his assistance and permission to use his interview with Robert Kroetsch.

### CONTENTS

### Acknowledgments

### THE SHORT PROSE WORK BY ROBERT KROETSCH: RE- IMAGINING ALBERTA

  1. The Stragglers

  2. The Toughest Mile

  3. That Yellow Prairie Sky

  4. The Harvester

  5. Who Would Marry a Riverman?

  6. Mrs. Brennan's Secret

  7. The Blue Guitar

  8. Defy the Night

  9. Say Ah

  10. Something Fishy in the Pool

  11. The Man in the Winter Catalogue (TV play)

  12. Strip Poker (TV drama)

THE SHORT PROSE WORK BY ROBERT KROETSCH: RE-IMAGINING ALBERTA

A reader, whose habits of perception and evaluation have been conditioned by conventional forms and techniques of poetry, I have been shocked on encountering the new frontiers of frontierlessness of the poetics of the postmodern Canadian author Robert Kroetsch, who seems to be struggling to capture in words the ineffable, the indeterminable and the unidentifiable. I deem it a creative shock, as it has thawed the indolence of complacency and pushed me out of the world of conditioned assents, hypothesis and contingency into a world of unsettling quest. I do not intend to indulge in superstitious veneration or envious malignity, but wish to hold a mirror upto the reactions generated in me on my critically self-conscious encounter with the postmodernist work of Robert Kroetsch, whose literary personality seems to elude final definition.

"Like the resourceful Coyote of Plains Indian Mythology, a figure central to his imagination, Robert Kroetsch is difficult to trap"1. He throws away the tight-lipped traditions of social realism and defies the restrictions of conventional forms, as he endeavours in his poetry to discover the 'I', the real being beneath the mirrored images of perception and a form through the metamorphosis of the formless.

In Robert Kroetsch we find a "historical transition...from a literature which assumed that it was imitating an order to a literature which assumes that it has to create an order, unique and self-dependent, and possibly attainable only after a critical process called 'decreation'" 2. He throws away the static ordered mythopoeic world view, which finds its expression in ritualised forms, which has been given literary application in conventional forms. He tries to capture the chaotic dynamism of the complex realities of the world, employing thematic and technical devices like self-reflexivity, sub-version or de-idealisation, de-centering, irony, parody, indeterminacy, generic paradoxes and mock-seriousness. These thematic and technical devices testify beyond doubt and dispute that Robert Kroetsch is a postmodernist poet.

The focus of his poetics is story. In an early conversation with Margaret Laurence he states his most often quoted sentence: "In a sense, we haven't got an identity until somebody tells our story. The fiction makes us real."3, indicating the important relationship between story and identity. In his famous 1982 conversations with Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson, Kroetsch further discusses his obsession with story. As a writer, Kroetsch is interested in the way he can use stories to communicate and connect to place, the incredible new place he calls Alberta.4 Thus, apart from story and selfhood, place is another category around which Kroetsch's poetics revolves. Kroetsch further explains in the interview that our real problem is how to deal with a new experience in a new place. Another problem in a new place is to find a new form to use, and that's why he kept trying different forms throughout his literary career. He poses a question "How do you live in this new country", a question that parallels a set of similar questions that he raised in his poem _Seed Catalogue_ (1977).

Robert Kroetsch has shown evident interest in the naked and primary problems of the poetic form. This is conspicuously perceptible in _The Ledger_ (1975) and _Seed Catalogue_. His poems seem to be an epiphany of the problematic relations between language and selfhood.

He has fed his and his people's experiences into the smithy of his alchemising genius. There they have been transmuted. The apparently unfinished products reveal his self and the corporate self of his people. In the introduction to _Seed Catalogue_ Kroetsch says that it is an 'ongoing poem', whereby he artfully implies the suggestive parallel between self and poem. Each individual poem is the suggestive analogy of an individual self. Each anthology becomes an implicit parallel to the corporate self of his people. He becomes acclaimed as a postmodernist, when we find multiplicity of implications in the same parallels. Each individual poem can be interpreted as the parallel to individual life. The anthology, which he epithetises as an 'ongoing poem' becomes the suggestive symbol of the ongoing phenomenon of life. He seems to be struggling to capture the protean forms of life, reality and self in the protean forms of language.

In _The Ledger_ and _Seed Catalogue_ the 'I' figures prominently. But the 'I' in these poems conforms to Kroetsch only superficially, because we find here only a hooded self. But what leaps off the pages and grapples our attention is the search for an adequate language and the quest for an authentic self. This elusive theme is central to both _The Ledger_ and _Seed Catalogue_. They contain a veiled examination of the poet's own family's past and his seeking after the personal source. The search for the past and self become incidentally the search for form and language. It is important in this context to note what he declares in _How I Joined the Seal Herd_ : "I am / writing this poem with my life"5. He wants us to understand the absurdity in any notion of that life "as the book of final entry / in which a record is kept"6.

The double entry, the double column printing of much of the poetry in _The Ledger_ implies the paradox in the attempt to find a balanced account of oneself. We find Kroetsch involved in the double-sided tale of construction and deconstruction as he enters _The Ledger_. He gives us the shocking realisation that the entries seldom balance. Wherever he looks, he finds holes. He finds "some pages torn out / by accident"7. He tries to fill up by imagining absences. He declares that everything he writes is a search, "a search for the dead", "for some pages remaining". _The Ledger_ becomes the record of his inward journey to his past. He doesn't find his past. He finds only the act of finding. This finding is disquieting, thematically and technically, which transforms _The Ledger_ into a symbol of the metamorphic nature of language and the elusive protean forms of reality. Each entry becomes an ambiguity, Kroetsch, who seeks adequate voice and utterance is caught in a disputed territory, a slippery ground between affirmation and negation - "Yes: no / no: yes"8. He tosses us between the columns in _The Ledger_ , knocks away notions, causes confusions and then compels us to emerge with new thoughts and to fill the gaps in his text intelligently.

_The Ledger_ evokes ancestral voices, which Kroetsch tries to record. In trying to record the ancestral voice, he attempts to speak. His attempt to speak becomes the unstable dialogue between the reality and the rendering, between the fact and the interpretation. In _The Ledger_ we find memory interacting with a document of the past. Memory engages itself in seeking the source. Kroetsch calls this a 'dream of origins'. It is the seedbed of song which he describes in his _Seed Catalogue_ :

"His muse is

His muse/if

memory is

and you have

no memory then

no meditation." 9

The interaction between memory and the document of the past is a baffling transformation of ambiguities. Yet ambiguities remain unresolved. This interaction which is essential to the inner journey, is recorded in _The Ledger_. Kroetsch acknowledges its effect upon the Orphic passion of eloquence and loss. The alchemising effect of the Orphic passion is seen when it transforms the very silence of death into magniloquence:

"everything you write

my wife, my daughters, said

is a search for the dead" 10

Conspicuously there is indeterminacy in the search, in the finding and in the form in which these two are recorded, and there emerges the elusive literary identity of Kroetsch as a postmodernist.

Robert Kroetsch who attempts to deconstruct the images of the records in the _The Ledger_ is a pure postmodernist. We find him trying to put back logs, which used for building the cabins of the early settlers, into "the original forests." His insistence on relieving the experience of "the confusion again/the chaos", on "marrying the terror" is quite evident. It is reflected in the language he uses. This descent into the destructuring element is recurrent in Kroetsch's works. _How I Joined the Seal Herd_ gives evidence of this. His flight back to the sea, which he honestly records in this poem, carries rich echoes and associations of this destructuring trend, which is characteristically postmodern.

The preoccupation with the inability of language in capturing and containing reality is a characteristic of postmodernism. The disquieting paradox of the defeat of language occurs in Kroetsch's writings. In _Seed Catalogue_ we get his stunning assertion: "We silence words/by writing them down."11

In _Seed Catalogue_ we get Kroetsch's dominant question: "How do you grow a poet?" The answer is implied in the seed time described in the poem. The seed time extends from his childhood to the present. If we want evidence of the postmodern technique of a meditation through memory upon the making of an imagination, the ten related sections of _Seed Catalogue_ offer it. The _Seed Catalogue_ is a metaphoric field. Here Kroetsch assembles the myths of seeding, decay and renewal. The poet seems to be preoccupied with a large conflict. The conflict is between the closed structures of the agrarian myths and the shamanistic role of the poet. For the shamanistic role he seems to prepare by adopting the techniques of innovation, elaboration and boundlessness. What is laudably remarkable is that his poetry is open in form. In _Seed Catalogue_ and _The Ledger_ there are no defined boundaries of genres. Prose fades into poetry gracefully and poetry weds prose in harmonious transfusion.

In _Seed Catalogue_ slightly varying questions are repeated: "But how do you grow a lover?" "How do you grow a prairie town?", "How do you grow a past....?, "But how do you grow a poet", "How do you grow a garden?". These variants are like the different coloured strands, which appear, disappear and reappear in the loom, finally emerging as a pattern. Here the pattern moves from the gardener to the garden. The flights of the lover and the poet complicate it. In this movement from the gardener to the garden, the mother's request: "Bring me the radish seeds" is repeated but evaded. It is noteworthy that her garden is the particular "locus" which stands in repudiation of the boundlessness of the hyperbolic story in _Seed Catalogue_. Normally the description of a garden assumes a halo of romance. Here it is divested of that. This we find even in the lack-lustre presentation of the image of a home place, which occurs in the first and last sections of _Seed Catalogue_ :

"No trees

around the house.

Only the wind.

Only the January snow.

Only the summer sun.

The home place:

a terrible symmetry."12

The mention of the double realm of winter and summer is in the postmodernist vein. It offers an enigma of identity. The postmodernist poet seeks a 'terrible beauty' through a 'terrible symmetry' of language.

"No. 176 - Copenhagen Cabbage:" This new introduction, strictly speaking, is in every respect a thoroughbred, a cabbage of highest pedigree, and is creating considerable flurry among professional gardeners all over the world. 13

Peter Thomas, who has done a deep study on the imaginative process of Kroetsch, which is as deceptive as Hemingway's allusive simplicity, tells us that in the lines given above we can find "the language of flight, expressing the wishful, hyperbolic dreams of winter kitchens". 14 The dreams of winter kitchens may be characteristically Canadian. But who else other than a postmodernist poet like Robert Kroetsch can present the hyperbolic dreams in the lustreless language of a piece of advertisement and yet make the description assume an unidentifiable grandeur? Normally we find poetry wrapped in the mist of metaphysical mystification. But here Robert Kroetsch divests poetry of that and he makes the muse embrace even the language of the advertiser and the accountant. "A tension between the language of acceptance and familiar meaning and that of storied enlargement is at work throughout _Seed Catalogue_ and remains intrinsic to Kroetsch's narrative methods elsewhere"15. In the second poem in _Seed Catalogue_ the language of the storied enlargement of the vegetable assumes a moral grandeur. The dry advertisement is spiced with a piece of preaching: "Virtue is its own reward." This provokes a sardonic laughter. In the characteristic postmodernist mode the poet makes us think as he provokes a laughter without mirth. An anti-song is characteristically postmodernist. In section 4 of _Seed Catalogue_ Kroetsch gives an anti-song, as he defines the town as a series of absences. There are no features of the personal or collective past in this town. Here through the postmodernist technique of negation Kroetsch effects paradoxically an affirmation. If we look for a deflationary story unravelled in unlyrical, sardonic, dislocated language, the following passage is sample enough:

"The Gopher was the model

Stand up straight:

telephone poles

grain elevators

church steeples

vanish, suddenly: the

gopher was the model." 16

In the seventh section of _Seed Catalogue_ we get a confessional note. Kroetsch describes a night out with A1 Purdy. Here we get the male/female imaginative tension. We find the demythifying hammer of the deconstructivist heavily banging at the hallowed myths of propriety and decorum. The concluding part of the section depicts the parable of male grain eloquence being punctured by a woman. The poetic genius of Kroetsch is found here involved in construction through deconstruction.

In the final two sections of _Seed Catalogue_ we find the consciousness of past and present appearing as an intricately woven pattern of recurrence. Kroetsch uses a startling metaphor from his family history. There are a 'terrible symmetry' and a stirring irony in his veiled allusion to the death of his cousin who died on a bombing mission over Cologne in 1943. He employs metaphors of planting and recurrence. The phrasal repetition enhances the effect:

''The danger of merely living.

a shell/exploding

in the black sky: a

strange planting

a bomb/exploding

in the earth: a

strange

man/falling

on the city

killed him dead."17

Conventional norms of poetic rhythm and symmetry of poetic language are exploded here. But the force of the images emerges through the unconventional lines.

Even conventional norms and concepts of propriety are shattered when the _'She'_ becomes "the holy shit mother" described in _Meditation on Tom Thomson_. The myths of Demeter and Aphrodite are deconstructed and then synthesized in the postmodernist deconstructivist mode. A new myth, ironically, emerges as Kroetsch describes the "holy shit mother". The elements of legendary awe around this myth as we find the "holy shit mother" sending forth her sons on Icarian flights of 'forgetfulness' and she herself remaining to guard memory and time.

In _Seed Catalogue_ we have the documentation of pieces of advertisement. But quite in the postmodernist mode, it assumes an aura of fancy: it moves into phantasy: it touches reality at poignant junctures.

In _The Ledger_ there is imaginative descent through time. Re-invited family past becomes the means for the imaginative descent. From the bounds of time and space, the descent is into a shamanistic dream song. Our acclamation of Robert Kroetsch as a postmodernist poet is justified as we critically analyse the characteristic concerns of Robert Kroetsch as a poet. We can recapitulate his characteristic concerns as : (1) the obsessive search for source, which he unravels in the _"dream of origins";_ (2) the duality of perception which he discloses in the double kingdom of winter/summer and in the male/ female hegemonies of underworld and vegetation; (3) the Orphic motif of descent, which he divulges in the motion of entry into chaos; (4) the structures of language of shamanistic dream. These thematic devices and technical peculiarities help us to ascertain the poetic identity of Robert Kroetsch as a postmodernist.

Kroetsch's contribution to postmodernism started with _boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature_ which he co-edited with William Spanos in the early 1970s. The journal featured literary criticism and creative writing and came into exitence as a reaction to the closure of boundaries produced by modern literature as Spanos explained in the interview18. A special issue of _boundary 2_ in 1974, A Canadian Issue, was dedicated to Canadian literary achievements in poetry and criticism. The issue was edited by Kroetsch himself, and though a talented novelist, he excluded fiction and short prose from the issue. Kroetsch's postmodern theories and essays were collected in _Labyrinths of Voice_ (1982) and in _The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New_ (1989). _The Lovely Treachery of Words_ included his postmodern manifesto "Unhiding the Hidden", first published in 1974, where he explained the significance of postmodernism for Canadian writers.

His obsession with place and his search for the garden and Eden, which is actually his home place Alberta, continues throughout his poems and prose works. Alberta is the place he keeps returning and in the interview to Neuman and Wilson he says: "The one place where I found a kind of open field was the garden because a garden is ambiguous on a farm"19. He considers himself a poet, a gardener who replants his home place in his imagination. His Eden is the Battle River where he grew up, but also his imaginary places Coulee Hill and Notikeewin that he mythologizes in his short stories and novels. Kroetsch's full recreation of the garden of Eden culminates in _The Words of My Roaring_ (1966) where he turns prairie into a lush garden with Helen Persephone as the central figure embodying bliss but also sin. He recreates Alberta to mythological dimensions so that it becomes his "magical kingdom, the centre of his imagination, a world he never left"20.

In the interview to Jefferson, Kroetsch gives one of his most complete defintions of place. For him place is "almost like clothing that you wear, it's even more than that, it's like your skin itself, place is a part of your body, and part of your mind, and we have to connect, if we don't connect with that place we are just aimless atoms floating around, ... we have to admit that it's a complicated connection we have with the landscape"21. By referring to this almost organic relationship with place and his native Alberta, Kroetsch finds the way how to understand Alberta, how to describe the indescribable which he can not capture in words. As he was away for years, his longing for home became his longing for language too because Alberta is not only the real place, it is also the place of his imagination.

Most of his poetic material was drawn from his home place which was his constant inspiration. The stories heard in Alberta beer parlours found their way into his short stories, novels, and poems. He claims that story, or myth, is generative22 opening up possibilities for new stories. It is "the act of telling the story that matters"23 and not the story itself. One and the same story can be told in different ways generating new and different meanings.

In reference to his poetic material, the new does not mean a new knowledge about the already given things and phenomena, but the sloughing off of the old false layers of meaning as well as the stereotypes in order to reach authenticity, while at the same time renouncing the already given mythological pattern and breaking down myths and stories into fragments. Kroetsch's canon is based on the story of an individual's struggle against the inherited social experience and inherited meanings which produce false interpretations. By way of a free combination of fragments and palimpsests, he creates new meanings different from the old ones codified by different patterns and frames. Kroetsch recreates old stories and fragments into new ones.

Kroetsch's first published short story _The Stragglers_ appeared in the April issue of _The Montrealer_ in 1950, while _The Toughest Mile_ came out in the November issue _._ Then came _That Yellow Prairie Sky_ in _Maclean's Magazine,_ 30 April, 1955. It was followed by _The Harvester_ and _Who Would Marry A Riverman?_ also published in _Maclean's Magazine_ in 1956. _Mrs. Brennan's Secret_ was published in _Maclean's_ too in 1957, and _The Blue Guitar_ in _The Canadian Forum_ in 1958, while _Defy the Night_ was published in _The University of Kansas City Review_ in 1960 and reprinted under the title _Earth Moving_ in _Stories From Western Canada_ in 1972. The publication of _Creation_ in 1970 included three stories: _Election_ _Fever_ , _Say Ah_ and _That Yellow Prairie Sky. Election Fever_ is the excerpt from _The Words of My Roaring_ and as such is not reprinted in this collection. _Say Ah_ was published as part of _Gone Indian_ (1973), but in a slightly different form. _That Yellow Prairie Sky_ is Kroetsch's first published full-length story as he explained in the interview with Margaret Laurence in _Creation_ 19. _Something Fishy In The Pool_ came out in _Toronto Life_ in 1978. _The Man in Winter Catalogue_ is a TV play and appeared in _Creation_ , while _Strip Poker_ appears for the first time in this collection.

The publication of the first short stories followed Kroetsch's pursuit of new experience in the north. He worked as a labourer on the Fort Smith Portage, then on the Mackenzie riverboats (the experience which he would use later for his novel _But We Are Exiles_ (1965) and in 1951 he went east to Winnipeg first, then to Churchill where he ran a company and spent three years working in Labrador. In 1954-55 he went to Montreal where he studied at McGill under Hugh MacLennan and intended to write a novel. Instead of a novel he wrote a short story "That Yellow Prairie Sky" about prairie farmers. He concludes his experience in the north the following way:

"After six years spent largely in the north I sat down in a room in Montreal to write a long novel. I wrote a short story called "Than Yellow Prairie Sky", a story about youth, and innocence, and crops, and weather – on the prairies where I grew up. Finally, I'd learned somethning about experience".24

In this story Kroetsch introduces the prairie as a character, explores the relationship between men and women living in the prairie, and shows how man can fall victim to weather and cosmic forces, the motifs that he would use later in his writing.

Kroetsch's characters in the stories experience difficulties and ordeals of living in the prairie so that their destinies remain "locked between dream and nightmare"25. This statement reflects the clash and the difference between the old and the new which Kroetsch explores in his fiction including the _Out West Triptych_. He anticipates his two visions of life: the apocalyptic vision and the nightmare of the harsh prairie reality, especially during draughts (the idea that he would focus on in _The Words of My Roaring)_ , and his visionary view of life, which he advocates, and which is based on a dream of possibility and change and of building up a better future where the promise of the fulfillment of dreams will be reality.

He continued to re-imagine Alberta into existence into his _Out West Triptych, The Words of My Roaring_ , _The Studhorse Man_ (1969), for which he won a Governor General's Award, and _Gone Indian_. _The Words of My Roaring_ and _The Studhorse Man_ give the rural portrait of Alberta in the twentieth century. _The Words of My Roaring_ is a novel about the elections during the Depression in the 1930s in Alberta, while _The Studhorse Man_ is a tale of Hazard Lepage roaming the prairies of Canada in quest for the perfect mare for his horse Poseidon. The story anticipates the incoming technological change and the replacement of rural values by urban values after the Second World War. _Gone Indian_ is about a U.S. student Jeremy Sadness going west to the frontier, to the Sasketchewan bush. _Gone Indian_ was followed by _Badlands_ (1975), another Alberta novel, about a woman's quest for dinosaur bones in the prairies and Badlands, while _What The Crow Said_ (1978), in which the author explores the possibilities of meaning, a novel where realism gives way to the fantastic, is about a printer and a talking crow inhabiting the city of Big Indian located on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Kroetsch's dedication to his native province resulted also in a travel book _Alberta,_ published in 1968, in which he gives his personal and objective account of the province.

By trying to capture and put prairie experience and landscape into fiction, Kroetsch mythologizes the prairie as the place of origin. As a westerner, his imagination responds first to possibility rather than to the past. Alberta is a country of possibility. He believes in the possibility to create anew, in the dream to be fulfilled. He sums up the western way of living:

"We took at this place, at these prairies, at this Alberta, and, to be poetic about it, we replace memory with desire. The popular name, next-year country, is not frightening to us. It is our shorthand name for a state of mind, a need, an obsession, a blind confidence, a desperate act of faith, a way of living"26.

By prophesying a new world, imagining his native Alberta, and turning predicament into potential in his stories and poetry, Kroetsch is a new creator dreaming the dream of what might be.

In _The Hornbooks of Rita K_ (2001), Kroetsch further explores his innovative and experimental approach to poetry. _The Hornbooks_ consists of poetical fragments about Rita K, the prairie poet who disappears misteriously one day from the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art. The author of the book is Raymond who lives on the prairies and who traces the life of his beloved Rita by way of the fragments she had left. Both Rita and Raymond appear as doubles of Robert Kroetsch, the poet and the scholar. Rita is both like and unlike Kroetsch. Like him, she travels all around the world lecturing and trying to write "an autobiography in which I do not appear"27. Unlike Kroetsch, she lives on a ranch in the Battle River Valley in Alberta. The book becomes Kroetsch's attempt to imagine himself as a poet and what might have been if he had not left his home. But like the missing Rita K or the missing poet from the text, this book of poetical fragments is about what is not rather than about what is. Or it is both about presence and absence. By tracing Rita's life, Raymond faces the dilemma:

"The question is always the question of trace,

What remains of what does not remain?"28

Raymond is Rita's lover, reader, archivist, who exchanges places with Rita, occupying her abandoned house, determining the relationship between self and other, poet and poem, reader and poem.

"We have made a small trade, you and I. I occupy your

abandoned house. Therefore, by your crystal logic, it is

who am missing from the world, not you. But surely it is,

always, the poet who is absent from the terrors of

existence, not the reader."29

By addressing "you" and "I", Raymond addresses the absent Rita both as the writer and the reader of his text. He also addresses us readers, who occupy the "abandoned house" of a poem or a story which the poet had left behind.

In _The Hornbooks_ , mediating on the function of art and poetry, the poet asks: "What's the poetic function of the hand?"30 and answers by asking another question: "Is not poetry a questing after place, a will to locate?"31 Kroetsch connects the function of poetry to a sense of place. His long poems _The Ledger_ and _Seed Catalogue_ are attempts to recreate his native place and home.

For Kroetsch, the poem is stored in memory. What we think and read and write is the memory of what was never made present or seen. The memory is the memory of trace, a fragment which makes poetry possible, the very possibility of life, for "to take poetry into one's hands is to take one's own life into one's hands"32. The possibility could be the trace of a 'dream of origins' or a 'local pride', or it could be the erasure and the absence because erasure constitutes the trace as trace, makes it like the snow that Rita admired, "disappear in its appearance"33, "disappear into art"34. The poet explains in _The Hornbooks_ :

"We turn to speak and confront an absence. Thus we

become, all of us, poets"35.

Kroetsch's attempt to decreate and recreate his home place is related to the memory of what had been and what had remained. His long poems and fiction comprise a kind of biographical and textual traces of the place of origin associated with the prairie where he grew up. His poems and stories are his memories about the home that had been and that can only exist in the present moment of memory, experience, and text.

August 2013 Tanja Cvetković

1Peter Thomas. Robert Kroetsch. (Vancouver : Douglas & Mcintyre, 1980): 1.

2 Frank Kermode. The Sense or an Ending (New York. Oxford University Press, 1967):167.

3 Robert Kroetsch. Creation. (Toronto: NewPress, 1970): 63.

4 Robert Kroetsch in an interview to John Jefferson, January 2008.

5 Robert Kroetsch. How I Joined the Seal Herd. in Field Notes. (Don Mills: General Publishing Co., 1981).

6 Robert Kroetsch. The Ledger. (London. Ontario: Applegarth Follies. 1975) (a)

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid. (b)

9 Robert Kroetsch. Seed Catalogue. in Field Notes. (Don Mills: General Publishing Co., 1981).

10 Robert Kroetsch. The Ledger (London. Ontario, Applegarth Follies. 1975) (a)

11 Robert Kroetsch. Seed Catalogue. in Field Notes. (Don Mills: General Publishing Co., 1981).

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Peter Thomas. Robert Kroetsch. (Vancouver: Douglas & Mcintyre. 1980):1.

15 Ibid. 25.

16 Robert Kroetsch. Seed Catalogue. in Field Notes. (Don Mills: General Publishing Co., 1981).

17 Ibid.

18 Spanos in George J. Searles. _Beyond the Boundary._ PDQ, November 1, 1974. University of Calgary Special Collections Library.

19 Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch.(Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1982): 21.

20Aritha Van Herk. Biocritical Essay. 1986. Available: <http://www.ucalgary.ca/library/speccoll/kroetschbioc.htm> Retrieved: July, 2001.

21 Kroetsch in an interview to Jefferson, January 2008.

22Robert Kroetsch. The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New.(Toronto:

Oxford University Press, 1989): 120.

23 Robert Kroetsch. Creation. (Toronto: NewPress, 1970): 53.

24 Robert Kroetsch. The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New.(Toronto:

Oxford University Press, 1989): 10-11.

25 Robert Kroetsch. Alberta. (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1993): 57.

26 Robert Kroetsch. "Turning Alberta Into Fiction". The Lethbridge Herald. Saturday, March 13, 1976. The University of Calgary Special Collections Library.

27 Robert Kroetsch. The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2001): 29.

28 Ibid. 8.

29 Ibid. 54.

30 Ibid. 31.

31 Ibid. 30.

32 Ibid. 45.

33 Jacques Derrida. Margins of Philosophy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 24.

34 Robert Kroetsch. The Hornbooks of Rita K. (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2001): 40.

35 Ibid. 53.

THE STRAGGLERS

The two young men glanced at each other when they stopped the third time to wait for the old man. Their glances confessed a smoldering hatred. Hatred, not of each other, but of the old man who stumbled after them.

If Noel Bird couldn't hurry, they would never overtake the caribou herd. If they didn't overtake the caribou herd, they would die.

Three men and three dogteams, and nothing to eat!

Two young men and one old man with hungry bellies, and somewhere ahead of them the caribou herd. Food and clothing and warmth and laughter, maybe over the next hill, maybe fifty miles beyond, and always their hungry bellies to urge their failing bodies on.

Whimpering dogs and empty sleighs and dying men. Skeletons that moved, and only three weeks before they had been Vic Powder and old Noel Bird, two Slavey Indians; and white Skinner Cameron; trappers by trade. All of them well-fed men from a valley to the west.

Now two of them were fugitives from justice; all of them were fugitives from death.

Only three weeks before Vic and Skinner - an Indian turned part white man and a white man turned part red - had sat in an isolated shack on an isolated trapline, drinking homemade brew and muttering against the other two men who shared their sub-arctic valley.

Archibald Bird and his father, Noel, were catching two furs to their one. And they knew why. Young Archibald was a master of Indian magic. His mother had taught him many things before she died.

Why should these two work hard if their neighbor was using magical roots and herbs? He could draw animals off one trapline onto the next, they were sure. For now it was late in winter, and didn't Archibald have more furs than the two of them together ?

Revenge, they muttered as they drank. Revenge.

The very next night they went visiting to play rat poker - for skins instead of money - and when Archibald began to win, a fight ensued. He was using magic. When the fight ended Archibald lay dead.

The two rejoiced. But their joy was short-lived. Slowly a sense of tragedy strangled their happiness. The valley was no longer theirs. They were homeless, hunted men; they who a moment before had been free trappers, the kings of their own little valley. They were murderers! Fear gripped them and they repented. But now their could be no turning back.

They woke old Noel and told him he must come. Weeping he followed, begging to be left to bury his son and tend his cabin, promising never to tell. But there could be no staying behind.

Out of their little valley they fled, out of the forest they knew, onto the tundra. To the east and to the north their dogteams led them, onto the treeless white Barren Lands: unknown, windswept, piercing cold.

For nine days they traveled northeastward, secure in the knowledge that numerous storms had blanked out their trail. The Mounties could never follow.

Then one morning the old Slavey Indian, who had become servant to his young captors, turned smiling from the frying pan and reported: "This is the last of the sowbelly, wise hunters."

Vic and Skinner looked at each other. "It is time to stop and hunt."

The old man laughed. "Hunt as you are hunted. My son is not forgotten by the spirits. Justice will track you where men cannot see."

The captors laughed too.

While one of them watched their prisoner, the other went in search of meat. A seemingly futile search, until five days later Vic found the trail of the caribou herd. They celebrated by consuming the last of their bannock. Now they had only tea. But why worry with no less than fifty thousand caribou ahead of them? Soon they would eat and be fat again.

Their dogs, always whimpering to be fed, were getting slower from lack of food. A well-weighted deerskin whip was all that would silence them and keep them moving.

For six days they followed the tracks, always sure of success tomorrow, never finding a thing and growing weaker by the mile. Their bodies were gaunt and they could no longer resist the cold. But they were blindly confident that soon they would overtake the caribou.

On the evening of the sixth day they came upon the remains of a caribou eaten by the wolves and licked clean by Arctic foxes. For days they had tasted nothing but the broth made from boiled moosehide.

Hunger seemed to have mellowed the old man's bitterness. "Soon there will be feasting. The foxes follow the wolf pack and the wolf pack follows the herd. We can't be far behind. The wolves always get the stragglers."

Next morning they were on the trail early. Already their nostrils quivered at the thought of boiled caribou tongue.

The sleighs were stripped of everything but the barest essentials - rifles, knives, firewood, bedrolls, a tent. It was futile to kill the fleshless dogs for food. After a meal or two they would be left to face death without a possibility of survival.

That day they covered even less ground than usual. But it was not the dogs' fault. Vic and Skinner grew more irritated and looked at each other knowingly. The old hatred was smoldering anew.

The old man could no longer keep up. They were always waiting for him, and while they waited the caribou were moving farther away.

That night they made camp early and lit a fire. An icy wind was blowing and there was no more tea. The two young men put up a tent so old Noel could rest better.

It was Skinner's first watch. Soon after Noel fell asleep he shook Vic. "Come on, Vic. I think I saw a caribou today."

Vic looked towards the old man's tent. "He sleeps?"

"The devil couldn't wake him."

Silently the two young men harnessed their dogs and stealthily they stole away from camp.

Skinner smiled weakly. "One day he promised to kill us. We'll see who kills who. The wolves get the stragglers. Ha!"

They traveled all night, faster than was good for their wasted bodies. All the next day they struggled on, and by sundown Skinner thought he saw a caribou again. But they were too exhausted to investigate. They made camp.

Towards morning they were awakened by the barking of dogs. Four sleigh dogs came into camp - without a sleigh and without a master. They were the dogs of old Noel.

Vic and Skinner stared in surprise. Not at the sight of the dogs without their master, but at the bellies of the dogs. They had gorged themselves. They had been fed!

The two young men became excited.

"Perhaps a straggling caribou came by and Noel shot it."

"Perhaps he knew where to find food and hung back on purpose. I told you I saw a caribou."

"Should we go back and make him give it to us?"

"Let's take his dogs and go on."

"But what if the herd is still many miles ahead?"

Skinner thought. "You're right. Noel has food for sure. By nightfall we can eat if we take his dogs."

They hitched Noel's dogs to Skinner's sleigh, and leaving everything behind, they spent their remaining energy in hastening back.

Shortly after nightfall they approached Noel's tent. The northern lights waved a glowing wand.

All was quiet and still, there was no fire.

"He's watching for us." Skinner said. "When his dogs got away he knew they'd come to us."

There were no trees and it was impossible to creep up on him by surprise. Then Skinner had an idea.

Both of them emptied their rifles at the small tent. That would cure Noel of his selfishness.

Weakly Skinner crawled into the tent with his knife ready.

Vic waited outside.

After a long pause, when nothing was to be heard but the silence of Arctic wastes, Skinner crawled out again.

His face was too shrunken to register emotion.

Eagerly Vic met him. "Give me some food."

"There is nothing."

Vic sat down in the snow. Tears streamed down his cheeks. "Is he in there, Skinner?"

Skinner raised his sunken eyes. "He must have frozen when the fire went out. The dogs, they must have ate - just a few bones in there."

Nearby a wolf howled mounfully; the pack began to circle in.

THE TOUGHEST MILE

Every young man dreams of going home one day, a hero. Moose Hegarty was no exception. As he stood at the wheel in the pilothouse, watching the ice come toward them, heavy ice, coining swift and hard, he was satisfied that he could play the hero part. But he wondered if he'd ever get home.

He was not a superstitious or a cowardly man. Moose Hegarty was strong and water-wise, and the "Arctic Raven" he piloted was as good a tugboat as had ever defied the Mackenzie River.

But when the banks are steep and narrow, end behind you in the darkness there are unseen rocks, and ahead of you the swift water is running heavy with ice, just then, when everything is wrong, and your starboard engine seizes up, it does sort of make you wonder.

Moose didn't curse or pray. "You caught us with our pants down," he said aloud, and he paused, as if the ice or the wind or the Providence Rapids would reply. But his words were lost in the darkness.

It was the six o'clock sort of darkness, wintry and cold; the sort that makes a wanderer dream of home.

A cigarette glowed red, then arced away from the open pilothouse window to the black water below.

"Well, what d'ya say, Moose?" the deckhand repeated.

"Okay, Shorty," Moose said. "You go ahead and get drunk when we get to Yellowknife. But I changed my mind. If we get out of this, I'm heading straight home. I got a woman waiting and the old man has a little cafe where all you got to do is shoot the bull with the boys and ring up the cash. Go ahead and work for the other guy. Work six hours on and six hours off and buck storms and freeze to death. But I'm heading back East - straight home."

"A woman, wait for you?" the deckhand said.

Moose didn't feel like joking, "Sure," he said. "A shy little home town girl. Nothing like the stuff you chase around with. The night I left she said she'd wait - well, forever, she said."

"When did you leave?" the skipper asked.

"I guess it must be six years now."

"Forever ain't that long, Moose."

But Moose wasn't listening. "I can just see her when I walk up the old front steps. 'Why Joseph Henry Hegarty, I thought you were way up North with the Eskimos.' 'Sweetheart,' I'll say, 'This wild goose has come home to roost. Make way for the prodigal son.' "

He wheeled the "Raven" hard to starboard, dangerously close to a boulder, away from an ice floe's jagged edge.

Skipper Arnasson watched Moose, saw the quick eyes judging, searching, remembering, saw the sure hands roving over the wheel; hands and eyes, hunting the easy water, challenging the ice, recognizing the ripple that betrayed a rock. A skillful man bound by his skill, the skipper thought, and as he watched and marveled, he was grateful, yet sorry. Sorry, not for the man, but for the dream that made the man. It was a fragile dream.

Moose groaned softly at the dull thud of ice hitting their barge and sawing into the wood.

"Better go see if she's leaking," he said to Shorty.

Shorty went into the night, and when he was gone the skipper said, "I got my doubts, Moose. We're still a long ways from home. You're the only guy who can get us through."

The long finger of the boat's searchlight probed into the darkness, found the shore and tried to trace a channel through the moving ice. "We're not licked yet," Moose said. "And I guess this is just about the toughest mile right here."

Down in the galley three men were sitting beside the stove, playing rummy. They were in a jam about which they could do nothing, and to protect their egos from fear and shame they were talking as if they were out of the jam and safe again. In their conversation they had delivered the barge to Yellowknife and flown out to Edmonton, and each man was elaborating on how much in the line of women and liquor he could buy with one thousand dollars.

After a long while their imagining was interrupted by the creaking of the galley door. Moose ducked in.

"What's the matter?" the cook said.

"Nothing," Moose said. "Just thought I'd have a coffee."

They felt guilty for not having taken him a coffee, so they tried to let him in on the fun.

"We're going to tie on a big one when we hit the city," the mate said. "You better come along."

"Count me out," Moose said. "I've had enough of that stuff. This year I'm heading home. I'm going to buy the old man's cafe at twice the value, just to show him his kid wasn't so bad after all, and I'll sit around for the rest of my days, counting money and telling the boys about the North. Instead of a tub like this, I'll go home to a warm house at night, and a little wife, and maybe a young one later on.

"I didn't know you were married," the mate said.

"I'm not," Moose said. "But wait'll I get home."

"You seem pretty sure that we'll get home," the cook said.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you guys. We're through the Rapids. We found a channel and some fairly slack water."

The three men looked at him, showing no admiration, suddenly ashamed of the fear they had harboured.

"You tell the boys about your wife and cafe," the mate said. "I think I'll hit the sack."

One year later, after an early freeze-up, Skipper Arnasson walked into a Yellowknife beer parlour, and the first person he recognized was Moose Hegarty. He walked over and sat down.

"Let me buy this one."

"Why hello, Skipper. When did you get in?"

They talked about boats for a while, and sampled their beer, before Arnasson said, "How are things back East?"

"I don't know."

"What's the matter?"

"I didn't quite get home."

"No?"

"No, I got off the plane in Edmonton, and I went to draw my money, and I stopped for a couple of beers with the boys, and then I got a hankering for a few of the old girl friends. And somehow I never got to the railway station. I woke up one morning back here in the North with a contract to go piloting."

"From where you get into town to where you get out, that's a tough mile too, eh, Moose?"

"Maybe for some guys, Skipper. But I've been up here seven years, and this fall I'm heading back East - straight home. The old man's got a little cafe where all you got to do is ring up the cash, and there's a house 1 always had my eye on - "

"You got a woman waiting?"

"You must be a mind reader, Skipper. I can just see her when I walk up the old front steps ..."

THAT YELLOW PRAIRIE SKY

I was looking at the back of a new dollar bill, at that scene of somewhere on the prairies, and all of a sudden I was looking right through it and I wasn't in Toronto at all any more - I was back out west. The clouds were moving overhead as if we were traveling and I pointed to that fence that's down and I said, "Look't there, Julie, that must be Tom's place. He hasn't fixed that piece of fence these thirty years." And then I noticed the elevator wasn't getting any closer.

It never does.

My brother Tom, he was quite a guy for women. I'll bet he was the worst for twenty miles on either side of the Battle River. Or the best, whichever way you look at it. I guess I wasn't far behind. Anyway, we spent the winter courting those two girls.

The way it happened, we met them in the fall while we were out hunting. I mean, we knew them all our lives. But you know how it is, eh? You look at some girl all your life, and then one day you stop all of a sudden and take another look, and you kind of let out a low whistle.

Well, Tom was twenty-three then, with me a year younger, and we'd grown up together. He taught me how to play hockey and how to snare rabbits and anything new that came along. Out on the prairies you don't have neighbours over your head and in your back yard, and a brother really gets to be a brother.

When it rained that fall and the fields got too soft for threshing we decided to go out and take a crack at some of the ducks that were feeding on our crop. We built a big stook that would keep us out of view, facing the slough hole and the setting sun, and we crawled inside. I can still see it all in my mind.

A thousand and a thousand ducks were milling black against the yellow sky. Like autumn leaves from the tree of life they tumbled in the air; a new flock coming from the north, a flock circling down, a flock tremulous above the water, reluctant to wet a thousand feet. And silhouetted on the far horizon was a threshing machine with a blower pointed at a strawpile, and nearer was the glint of the sun on the slough, and then a rush of wings from behind, overhead, going into the sun, and with a sudden jolt the autumn-sharp smell of a smoking gun.

I let go with both barrels at a flock that was too high up, and before I could reload there was a scream that left my jaw hanging as wide open as the breech of my old 12-gauge.

"I swear," Tom said, "now ain't that the prettiest pair of mallards that ever came close to losing their pin-feathers?"

I pushed my way out of the stook, and Tom was right.

I guess they didn't see us. I mean, Kay and Julie.

They were standing back of our stook, looking scared, with their skirts tucked into - tucked up – and nobody thought of it in the excitement, or at least they didn't.

"Are you trying to kill us?" Julie asked, pushing back a blond curl and pretending she was only mad and not scared at all.

"Can't you see we're shooting ducks?" Tom said.

"I can't by the number that fell," she said.

That's when I spoke up. "They were too high and I was too anxious."

Julie looked at me and my gun and she blushed. "I didn't mean to insult your shooting. I've heard folks say you're one of the best shots around."

Funny thing. I was pretty good, but just about then I could've told a battalion of the Princess Pat's to back up and drop their guns.

It was then that the redhead, Kay, spoke up. "Really, I'm glad you missed. I hate to see things get killed.

"Tom looked up at the distant ducks for a minute, and then said, "As a matter of fact, I hate it myself." It was the first time I ever heard Tom say a thing like that. Most of the time you couldn't hold him.

There was a kind of a loss for words. Then Kay explained, "We're making boxes for the box social in the church hall tonight, and we're taking the short cut over to Rittner's place to borrow four little wheels that the Rittners have left over from the little toy wagon that Halberg's new automobile ran into."

"We're in a terrible hurry," Julie said, "so instead of going around by the road we're going to wade across Rittner's slough -"

And then they noticed it too, and before Tom could say he figured as much, they were in the slough wading above their knees.

"A nice pair of shafts," Tom commented.

"A dandy pair," I said. But I soon found out I was talking about a different pair.

That night at the box social Tom paid three dollars and a half for the lunch box that looked like a pink Red River oxcart with toy wagon wheels on it. He figured it was Kay's because she had red hair, and in a pinch we could make a switch.

Some religious fellow caught on to me and ran me up to five and a quarter on the yellow one. It was a great help to the church committee, and it looked like a fair enough investment otherwise. Sure enough, I got Kay's and I wanted Julie's, so Tom and I switched and the girls never caught on; or at least they never let on that they did.

Through the rest of the fall and during the winter Dad had to do the chores quite a few times by himself. Tom and I didn't miss a dance or a hayride or a skating party within trotting range of the finest team of dapple greys in the country. We didn't have all the fancy courting facilities that folks here in the east have, but we had lots of space and lots of sky. And we didn't miss much on a frosty night, the old buffalo robe doing whatever was necessary to keep warm. ...

The northern lights in the winter sky were a silent symphony: flickering white, fading red and green, growing and bursting and dying in swirls and echoes of swirls, in wavering angel-shadows, in shimmering music. And on one edge of the wide white prairie shone a solitary light, and toward it moved a sleigh with the jingle of harness, the clop of hoofs, the squeak of runners on the snow, and the jingling, clopping, squeaking rose up like the horses' frozen breath to the silent music in the sky.

I guess we did pretty well. I remember the night we were driving home from a bean supper and dance, and Julie said, "You're getting pretty free with your behavior."

"Well, you're going to be my wife soon enough," I said.

"It can't be soon enough," she whispered, and she pushed my arm away. Women are always contrary that way.

Tom and Kay were curled up at the back of the sleigh and they couldn't hear us.

"Let's get out and run behind for a ways," I said. "My feet are getting cold. And I can clap my hands."

"My feet are warm," she said.

"But mine aren't."

"You're just making that up because you're mad."

"Why would I be mad?"

"You're mad because I stopped you."

"Stopped me what?"

She didn't want to say it. "Nothing," she said.

"I think I'll get out and run behind by myself," I said. "Should I?"

She reached up and kissed me right on the mouth, cold and yet warm, and that was that as far as the running behind went.

"Let's talk," she said. "We've only been engaged since midnight, and here you want to act like we're married already."

"Who, me?" I said, trying to sound like I didn't know what she was talking about. "Let's talk," she said.

"Talk," I said. "I'm all ears."

"Don't you want to talk?"

"Sure I want to talk. If I can get a word in edgewise."

"I can't get used to being engaged," she said. "I want to talk."

"What'll we talk about?" I said. "It seems to me we've done nothing but talk since last fall."

"Let's plan," she said.

That was the end of my plans.

"We're going to get married, remember?" she went on. "You asked me and I said yes before you had hardly asked the second time."

"You weren't so sure I'd ask a third time."

She soon changed that subject. "Kay said that she and Tom are going to build a house this fall."

"It's a good idea. Living on the home place is no good for them and no good for Ma and Dad."

"Why can't we build a house?"

"We got a shack on our place."

"Shack is right. One room and a lean-to."

"It's a roof."

"Kay and Tom are going to get a new bedroom suite and a new stove, and Kay is going to start making new curtains. I could start making new curtains too if we were going to have a new house with lots of windows."

"If we get a good crop, okay. But I got enough stashed away to get married on and put a crop in, and that's it."

"I want to make a nice home for you. We'll have a family."

"We might," I said. "But things'll have to pick up."

"Promise," she said.

"Sure enough," I said.

"I mean, promise we'll have a new house."

"Don't you think it would be better to wait and see?"

She didn't answer.

"We might flood out or dry out or freeze out. How do I know?"

She still didn't answer.

"What if it's a grasshopper year? What about wireworms and wild oats and rust and buckwheat?"

"Promise me," she said. "I don't even think you love me."

That was her final word.

I talked for another ten minutes about wireworms and rust, and after that things got quiet. We sat in that sleigh for an hour, our breath freezing in our scarves (twenty-seven below, it was), wrapped in a buffalo robe and in each other's arms and never once did she speak. To a young fellow twenty-two years old it didn't make much sense. But I didn't push her away. She was soft and warm and quiet, and I though she had fallen asleep.

"Okay," I said, finally. "Okay okay okay. I promise."

She snuggled closer.

We had a double wedding in the spring.

Tom's father-in-law fixed up two granaries near the house and we held the reception at his place. Everybody was there. My cousin had trouble with the pump, and while everybody was watching him trying to tap the keg, Tom came over to where I was watching the sky for a nice day and he shook my hand.

"We're the luckiest pair of duck hunters this side of the fourth meridian," he said. "We've each got a half section that's almost paid for, we've got a big crop to put in that'll put us on our feet, and we've each got the prettiest girl in the country. How do you like being a married man?"

"Yes sir," I said. I had one eye on a couple of my old sidekicks who were kissing the bride for the second time. "This here love business is the clear McCoy."

I remember that my cousin drew the first pitcherful just then, and it was all foam. But we were only just married. ...

The sky was the garment of love. It was a big sky, freckled with the stars of the universe; a happy sky, shrouding all the pain. It was the time of spring, and spring is love, and in the night sky arrow after arrow of honking geese winged across the yellow moon, driving winter from the world.

Right after the wedding we moved into the shack and really went to work. I was busy from morning till night putting in a big crop, while Julie helped with the chores and looked after her little chicks and put in a big garden. When the crop was in we started on the summer fallow, and before that was done it was haying time.

At noon she brought dinner out to me in the field, out in the sun and the wind, and we sat side by side and talked and laughed, and the dust from my face got on hers sometimes, and sometimes I didn't get started quite on time. And the weather was good too. ...

In the evening a black cloud towered up in the west and tumbled over the land, bringing lightning and rain and hope. In the morning there was only a fragment of cloud; the dot worn on a woman's cheek beside a pair of beautiful eyes, and the beautiful sun in the fair blue sky sent warmth and growth into the earth, and the rain and the sun turned the black fields green, the green fields yellow.

I remember one Sunday we went over to Tom's for a chicken supper. Tom and Dad and I talked about the way the crops were coming along and where to get binder repairs, and we made arrangements to help each other with the cutting and stooking.

The womenfolk talked about their gardens and their chickens until Julie mentioned the drapes she was sewing.

"I'm going to have one of those living room parlours," she said; "one of those living room parlours with lots of windows, like in the magazines, and I'm making drapes for that kind of window."

"I think I will too," Kay said. "Tom cut some of the nicest plans out of last week's Free Press. I hope the fall stays nice."

"My husband is even getting enthusiastic," Julie said, giving me a teasing smile. "I caught him holding up the drapes one day and looking at them."

Ma said she was crocheting some new pillow covers for all the pillows and easy chairs that seemed to be coming up, and she thought they all better get together and do some extra canning. Entertaining takes food.

Kay said, "Ma," meaning her mother-in-law, "you'll soon have your house all to yourself again. And since Tom is afraid he'll have to help with the washing, he's going to get me a new washing machine."

"We might pick up a secondhand car," Julie said, "if the crop on our breaking doesn't go down because it's too heavy."

I had mentioned it'd be something to tinker on during the winter.

It wasn't long before Julie was talking about the washing machine and Kay was talking about a secondhand car. Wheat was a good price that year.

We menfolk laughed at the women and we found a few things in the Eaton's catalogue that we could use ourselves. It seemed that somebody was always coming up with something new that we couldn't possibly do without.

After supper we all walked out to have a look at Tom's crop. Tom could even make a gumbo patch grow wheat. I guess it happened a week later. I mean, the storm. Julie was working on her drapes. It was a hot day, too hot and too still, and in the afternoon the clouds began to pile up in the west. ...

The storm came like a cloud of white dust high in the sky: not black or grey like a rain cloud, but white; and now it was rolling across the heavens with a brute unconcern for the mites below, and after awhile came the first dull roar. The hot, dead air was suddenly cool, stirring to a breeze, and then a white wall of destruction bridged earth and sky and moved across the land and crashed across the fields of ripening grain.

Old man Rittner saw it coming west of us, and he went out and drove his axe in the middle of the yard, figuring to split her. But she didn't split.

In fifteen minutes it was all over and the sun was shining as pretty as you please. Only there was no reason for the sun to shine. Our garden and our fields were flat, and the west window was broken, and half the shingles were gone from the shack. The leaves were half stripped from the trees, and the ground was more white than black and, I remember, the cat found a dead robin.

My wife didn't say a word.

I hitched up old Mag to the buggy and Julie and I drove over to Tom's place.

Tom was sitting on the porch steps with his head in his hands, and Kay was leaning on the fence, looking at her garden. It looked like they hadn't been talking much either.

I got out and walked over to Tom, and Julie stayed in the buggy.

"A hundred percent," I said.

"The works," he said. "And all I got is enough insurance to feed us this winter or to buy a ticket to hell out of here."

"The same with me," I said.

We couldn't think of much to say. All of a sudden Tom almost shouted at Kay: "Say it and get it over with. If you want we'll go to the city and I'll get a job. I can get on a construction gang. They're paying good now. We'll get a washing machine and a secondhand car." He looked at his wheat fields, beaten flat. "We'll make a payment and get our own house."

He kicked at a hailstone.

"A house with big windows for my new drapes," Kay added.

Tom got up and he walked to the gate where Julie sat in the buggy. Kay and I, we stood there watching him, almost afraid of the storm in his eyes, and Kay looked at me as if I should stop him before he went and grabbed a pitchfork or something.

"Tom, I was joking," Kay said. "I don't need fancy curtains and a washing machine. And we never needed a car before. Did we, Tom? We got enough for us and Ma and Dad. Haven't we, Tom? And we got next year."

Tom snorted at that idea. He kicked open the gate and walked out toward the barn. There was so much helpless anger in him he couldn't talk.

Kay called after him. "We still got this, Tom." She was kind of crying. She was pointing at the black dirt that showed through the broken grass. "Look, Tom, we still got this."

Tom, he stopped in the middle of the yard and he turned around. For a long time he was only looking at Kay's empty hand.

All of a sudden he bent down like he was going to say a prayer or something. And he scooped up a handful of hailstones, and he flung them back at the sky.

Like I say, my wife; she didn't say a word.

THE HARVESTER

He came in shortly after six o'clock that morning, in a cattle truck off Highway 13. Maggie was just opening the roadside café for the day's business and was alone, and she came from the kitchen when the door slammed, and she went to the counter as two men sat down.

The trucker pushed his cap back with a greasy hand and flicked the menu from between a ketchup bottle and a napkin holder. "Ham and eggs scrambled – in a hurry," he said. "Black coffee."

Maggie nodded and turned to the old man. She saw his quiet grey eyes devouring yesterday's cakes and pies, stale behind the counter. She pretended not to see as he opened his hand on a few coins like a poker player looking at his cards. He closed his hand again, then paused before he said, "Coffee with a little cream ... and buttered toast."

Maggie hurried to prepare and serve the orders, and after that she hoisted her heavy body onto the boss' stool behind the cash register and listened while the trucker gulped his food and complained about the road. She watched the old man.

He was a harvester, apparently, and he drank his coffee slowly, not talking, and when the trucker slapped some change on the counter and went to the men's room, Maggie stood up to pick up the change. "You better get a wiggle on, mister," she said, "or you'll miss your ride."

"I'm staying," the harvester said.

Maggie started to question him, but she heard the coffee boiling over in the kitchen and she hurried away. She did not return till the trucker yelled so-long, and then she came out to say so-long, and went to the from window to watch.

After the truck was gone she stood starting for a moment; she stared across the highway at the flat fields, glinting yellow in the cold morning sun, at the wheat lying swathed and ready for the combine. Then she turned away with a jerk, knowing that work would take the dull sleepy ache out of her bones, and she began to pick up the dirty dishes.

She left the harvester's empty cup sitting in front of him. "Working around here?" she asked.

"Come west to work every year," the harvester said.

"A combine man?" Maggie asked.

"I'm a field pitcher."

Maggie stopped with the dishes stacked on her arm. "You mean, you _were_ a field pitcher. You used to be. But you ain't since they shut down the threshing machines."

"I'm a field pitcher," the harvester repeated.

Maggie shrugged and took the dishes into the kitchen and came back with a damp cloth. She was wiping the counter when suddenly the harvester asked, "You a widow woman?"

"Twice married and twice widowed," Maggie said. "No family either time." Then she noticed the harvester's quiet steady gaze on her rings, and she felt obliged to explain. "I didn't take up short-order cooking till my second husband died with his heart. He was a body-repair man. My first husband owned the biggest steam-threshing outfit in these parts."

The harvester smiled for the first time. "Fun working then," he said.

"Fun cooking then," Maggie said. "You cooked meals, not pig feed. And you fed men. But you got to change with the times."

It was a saying she had, and usually people said, "Yeah, you got to." But the harvester only dropped two coins on the counter. "Eating and everything," he said. "It was fun then."

Maggie stopped dead. Toast and coffee wasn't a pleasure for this man. It was as if someone had switched on a light in a shadowed recess of her memory. She stopped suddenly and forgot the hamburger she'd neglected to take out of the freezer the night before, and she was a young woman again, just come to her brother's homestead from Ontario. She remembered the young men coming west at harvest time; the trainloads of young men, laughing, shouting, singing, fighting over a pretty girl, pitching bundles all day and dancing half the night. She remembered now: city boys with blistered hands, their jaws set hard beneath their smiles, countrymen form the eastern valleys, staring in disbelief at the broad plains. She remembered sixteen strong men at a plank table, threshers eating like threshers and praising the cook by the way they glanced at a steaming dish; one man eating enough for three and topping it off with a wedge of her famous Dutch apple pie. And she saw, in her mind's eye, a hundred lean, bronzed, handsome harvesters, licking their pie plates clean and glancing up with sheepish grins and asking for more.

And suddenly, standing there with a dirty dishcloth in her hand, remembering – suddenly she saw this one, bent, lonely, ill-fed survivor, this one old harvester from all that migrant crowd of young men. And she stared at his gnarled brown hands shaped to fit a pitchfork handle; empty hands that once lifted a grain-heavy bundle or a washtub full of lunch or a laughing girl. She saw the old brown suit coat, too big over the new bib overalls and the checkered cotton shirt. She stared and forgot about cold cereals and club sandwiches and cake mix. And she pushed back the nickel and dime and she signaled the old harvester to follow her into the kitchen.

When the waitress came to work she fluttered in at the kitchen door like an injured bird and pleaded, "Please, Maggie. You know what the boss said."

"Shhh," Maggie said.

"You know," the little waitress insisted. "You know what he'll do if he catches us feeding somebody free."

Maggie raised a stained square finger to her lips. "See?" she said, and with a slight nod she indicated the old harvester bent over the kitchen table.

The little waitress only frowned her disapproval.

Maggie dropped her hands into her apron pockets and pointed again by staring intently at the harvester's boots, hooked around the legs of the backless chair. "See?" she repeated.

The harvester's boots were as new and shiny as the neckties in a country store. Their black toe caps were not stubble-worn. The new bib overalls were not frayed at the cuffs.

The waitress saw now, saw the absence of wear and understood, and nodded with pity and reluctance.

"Just keep the boss out of the kitchen till after breakfast," Maggie said. She handed the waitress an empty tray and turned again to her task.

She would fill an order form ham and eggs or hot cakes, and then she would turn to the old harvester and serve him another helping of riced potatoes and dumplings and gravy and another slice of roast beef. "Just like it used to be, old timer," she would say. "Holler if you want more."

Usually he nodded and leaned away from his plate to let her dish up more creamed carrots or buttered peas or corn on the cob. But one time he said. "No hurry at dinnertime, ma'm. We got to wait for the horses to eat."

It was then Maggie realized he wasn't quite all there any more.

He was eating heartily and did not notice when Annie Melnyk, the waitress, complained, and Maggie thought he did not notice later when Annie stuck her head through the window-like opening that joined the kitchen to the café. "Where are those sausages, Maggie? The customer's in a hurry, and the boss just got here and he'll be asking about them in minute."

"Be ready in jiffy," Maggie said.

Annie sniffed and looked around and saw the pie sitting on the window ledge to cool; saw the criss-crosses of flaky crust and the rich cinnamon color and the sweet, mouth-watering promise of sliced apples in a creamy sauce. "Maggie, we'll get our walking papers if the boss sees that. He told you never to make Dutch apple pie because pie mix is cheaper, and he'll know you didn't make it to sell."

"Keep him glued to his cash register," Maggie said, and she slid a plate of sausages through the window to Annie. "We can't quit at this stage of the game."

The old harvester raised up and looked around from the tale. "Ma'am."

"Maggie Winters," Maggie said.

"Mrs. Winters," the harvester said. "I'm afraid I'm causing you a lot of trouble, I'd better leave."

"There's no hurry. We'll let you know whenever there's a ride out of town."

"I'm getting a job here," he said. "I'll pay you as soon as I get a job."

"Forget it," Maggie said. She slapped a slice of pressed ham into a pan. "Don't worry about it."

The old harvester pulled a cheap pocket watch from the pocket on the front of his bib overalls. "It's nearly nine," he said. "The farmers'll be in any minute now, looking for help. Will that little girl tell them I'm here?"

Maggie flipped the ham over. "She'll them. Don't worry." She moved over to the sink to wash some of the pans she had used to prepare the big dinner.

The harvester looked around to see that his things were not in the way. When he came into the kitchen he took off his coat and hung it on a nail, and then he carefully lay his faded cap on the floor beneath it, and he placed his new kangaroo tan leather glover in the cap. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and the sleeves of his woolen underwear, and he turned his shirt collar under, and Maggie was confused for a moment, for she had forgotten. Then she remembered and hurriedly cleared the sink, and the harvester washed, scrubbing his neck and ears as if he had been in dust and chaff, blowing vigorously as he lifted the cold water to his face with both hands and rubbed, and he ran his wet hands back over his heavy grey hair when he finished. And after he dried, using Maggie's towel, he went to his suit coat for a comb and slicked his hair down meticulously.

By that time Maggie had the table set and a bowl of noodle soup waiting, and she changed her apron when he wasn't looking, and brushed at her own grey hair. And she remembered how she always put on a clean and freshly starched dress before the threshers came in.

Now the harvester pushed himself back from the table and fished inside the bib of his overalls to a shirt pocket for his papers and tobacco.

"Just a minute," Maggie said. "Your dessert will be ready in a minute." She wanted to stall him while the pie cooled, and she asked, "Have you been through this country before?"

"I had a thirty-two-day run here. That's why I came back."

"That was quite a few years ago," Maggie said.

"Only twenty-four years. Twenty-four years this fall. Thirty-two days without a breakdown or a stop for the weather. But it was snowing the afternoon we finished. The bundle teams raced in from out in the field with the pitchforks bouncing on the empty racks and the men shouting to each other. And by the time they got unhooked the ground was white. It sort of made you want to sing."

Maggie nodded.

"The farmer was a man from Bruce County, and he had a keg of beer and some cheese and crackers and dill pickles and homemade sausage waiting, and we went to work and cleaned that all up. And then we went into town." The harvester rubbed his knuckles. "A crew from the next town was in the beer parlor, and we started mentioning how much wheat we could thresh in a day, and we took a dislike to the way they suggested our figures might not be exact. So we up and threw them out of the place. We had a Swede from up near Camrose who could pick up a man in each hand. He must have been seven feet –"

"That was twenty-five years ago," Maggie said. "My first husband was still alive. We got threshed that fall, but our neighbors didn't, and Ben helped them, digging the stooks out of the snow. They threshed one morning when it was twenty-seven below."

"I slept in a straw-pile bottom on a night when it was just about that cold," the harvester said. "That was my second year west. But it got warm when it started to snow, and in the morning by boots were clean out of sight. We threshed all that day out of a stack and sent half the next night on the open prairie, moving the outfit eighteen miles."

"I was cooking for a steam outfit my second year out here," Maggie said. She wiped her hands on her apron and leaned against an old meat block. "Used to take a team and democrat and drive into town for groceries once a week. I remember one time a cowboy followed me on his saddle horse for three hours, trying to make a date for a dance over at the MacFarlanes' house. He was carrying a real six-shooter." She smiled. "But if my crew had seen him they'd have skinned him al-"

"Hey, Maggie!"

It was Annie Melnyk's voice at the little window. "Quick! Where's that order of fried eggs?"

"Lordie me, I forgot!" Maggie said. She heaved her heavy body up off the meat block and with a sigh picked up two eggs in one hand and cracked one on the edge of a frying pan. "Help yourself to the pie," she told the harvester.

While Maggie waited for the eggs to fry she remembered other harvesters; young men who made a stake and didn't come back, or better still, young men who came and stayed. They homesteaded, waiting for spring, enduring the long winter in the tar-paper shacks set on the bald prairie. They watched the nail heads whiten with frost and, watching, remembered with hidden tears the joys of the past. They dreamed with a bursting eagerness the great lonely dream of the future; turned the grey sod black in their dreams, loved beautiful women, built gracious homes. And through the long dark nights they huddled in thin blankets and listened to the wind.

And they were old and prosperous now; men who had jabbed their fork tines into the dry earth and squatted on a stook and passed around a jug of water; weary men who had tugged a package of makings from a sweaty shirt pocket; men who had known the comradely warmth of "Care to roll one?" And they blew lazy clouds of expensive smoke now, and wintered in front of television sets, and paid cold cash for their wives' fur coats.

But here was one old man, still wandering, still sitting up all night in a day coach, watching the yellow fields appear in the dawn. Still drifting back and forth, stubborn and stupid, Maggie thought. And she, just as stubborn and just as stupid, and too old to boot, was risking her own and the waitress' job, just to give him one square meal. Just to feed one old harvester who wasn't quite right n the head anymore. He had caught her at a soft moment and how she regretted it, and she turned on him, roughly. "Just what do you do in the wintertime?"

"The bush," he said. "I get a job in the bush just north of Lake Superior."

I might have guessed it, Maggie thought: the prairie and the forest. One old man living like the sole surviving member of a tribe, wandering onto the prairie in the summer, back into the shelter of the forest in winter. "You got to change with the times," she told him. "What's a field pitcher nowadays?"

The old man straightened p and turned with a polite and indestructible pride. "A good field pitcher can make a threshing crew," he said. "He ain't just the man who helps the teamsters load the bundle wagons."

"I didn't say that," Maggie said.

"Give me a twenty-eight-inch machine and six greenhorns and six new teams, and by the end of a week they'll be a threshing outfit."

"I'm not arguing," Maggie said. But now she was losing her temper at his blind perseverance. "I'm not arguing about that."

"Give me six dudes," the old man said, "and by the end of a week they'll know how to build a load of bundles that won't slide out and will still be easy to pitch into the feeder. They'll know how to lift a fork all day without breaking their backs, and they'll just wear gloves in the morning while it's cold, and they'll have calluses instead of blisters."

"Sure," Maggie said. Her anger was a lump in her chest now. "That's just fine. That's great. But you got to change. My boss doesn't break his back doing anything and he doesn't wear gloves except at funerals and he doesn't get any handouts from anybody – and his calluses are all on his behind."

The harvester looked away and his voice dropped almost to a whisper. "Give me a new teamster and a team just in off the range, which is all you can find nowadays, and where will you find a man to train them? I've taught grown men how to tie the reins to the rack and how to turn by touching a pitchfork to the reins. These new men don't know what gee and haw mean, let alone do the horses know. And when I get finished, a team won't always be trying to eat a stook, and it won't run away if some partridges fly up, and it won't be scared of the tractor."

Maggie slid the fried eggs and an order of toast out to Annie. "I understand," she said. She was ashamed of herself, but her anger was still a tight dry knot. "A good team is just dandy. Except they got combines now – self-propelled. They do the work. They work day and night when the weather's fine. And when it rains you don't have men and horses standing around idle."

The harvester looked up at the ceiling and paused before he answered. "I imagine it don't rain too often in here."

"Eat your pie," Maggie said.

"Those rainy days were good ones," the harvester said, "even if they didn't make much money. We'd lay in the bunk shack all day and listen to the rain on the roof and listen to it hissing where it ran down the stovepipe. And I'd play Prairie Redwing or something on the mouth organ and you'd hear feet keeping time or somebody humming maybe, and after everybody was slept out there'd be a game if rummy and maybe some sock mending to do, and there'd be good talk about other places and riding the rails and the good times we'd had."

"And you'd eat too much and sleep some more," Maggie said.

"If we had a good cook. And sometimes we'd hit a poor one, and we'd work like the devil to get off the place, and one hour before suppertime some evening a good cook would get word that she was getting the threshers."

"That happened to me more than once," Maggie said. But this time she was only soft for a moment. "Now I could give them a short-order hamburger."

"Maggie!"

It was the waitress.

"What now?"

"That hamburger. Did you forget it?"

"Hold your horses. It was half-frozen."

"It's for the boss."

"Lordie me," Maggie said. She pressed down on the grease-spitting hamburger with a spatula. "We're done for."

"There's a trucker outside," Annie said. "In a yellow oil truck. He's going up the line a-ways."

"Quick," Maggie said, turning to the harvester. She picked up his cap and gloves and took his coat off the nail. "Go out the back door and around to the front, and a man in a yellow oil truck is waiting for you."

"Is there threshing up the way he's going?"

"There'll be something or other. Quick."

The harvester stood up and started putting on his coat. "Excuse me, ma'am, but could I take a piece of that pie with me?"

"Sure, anything," Maggie said. She pulled the waxed paper off a loaf of bread and turned to cut the pie. The harvester had eaten half.

"Hurry," Annie said. "The boss is coming."

The harvester slid the wedge of pie into his suit-coat pocket and went to the back door. But in the doorway he stopped.

Maggie raised her hand as if to shoo him along, but he would not be interrupted, and he thanked her quietly and politely. Maggie stopped pushing as he talked, and he only stepped away as the boss elbowed Annie aside and stuck his head in at the serving window.

"Where the hell's that hamburger?"

Maggie turned from the open door and saw the pinched sallow face in the little window, like a portrait come to life in its frame, and she did not say a word. She went to the stove and flipped the half-done patty of meat out of the pan, onto an open bun. She slapped it onto a plate and dumped raw onions and relish and mustard onto and around it. She tilted a ketchup bottle upside down and hit the bottom with the palm of her hand, and ketchup spattered the hamburger and the boss's hand.

"Watch out, that stuff costs money. Don't waste –"

Maggie spun the plate across the counter toward the window.

The boss caught it in self-defense and started to shout. But his eyes grew puzzled and he picked up the hamburger and pushed it woodenly into his gaping mouth, and he retreated from the little window.

Annie Melnyk, frightened and astounded, burst in at the kitchen door. "What's the matter?" she whispered. "What's –"

Maggie's face was as radiant as a child's. Her set mouth was smiling softly and her eyes were bright and two tears clung to the cheeks of her tired, careworn, sweaty, red face. "He remembered," Maggie said. She caught her rough stained hands together in front of her apron like a woman recalling a lover. "After twenty-five years, he still remembered. He called me Mrs. Rinehart."

"You're Mrs. Winters," Annie said. "Don't you feel –"

"Rinehart," Maggie said. "My first husband's name. After twenty-five years he still remembered Mrs. Rinehart. He remembered my Dutch apple pie!"

Annie shrugged and noticed the pan sizzling empty on the stove and moved it, and outside a truck roared and was gone.

And then, in the quiet morning air, there was only the distant drone of the combines.

WHO WOULD MARRY A RIVERMAN?

Usually when the boat landed, the three of them came in together for a drink, but this time there were only Gabe and Little Joe. They sat down at our table with an empty chair between them. Someone moved two glasses with the calculated innocence of a chess player and everyone watched from behind a long swallow.

Gabe wiped the foam off his upper lip like a man just back from a funeral. "Our Johnny Muskeg," he began, "he loved a woman, you understand. And she loved him too, in a way, and in a way she didn't."

Little Joe was trying to grow a beard and he stroked the fuzz on his chin as if he expected to catch a couple mice. "Dames are like that," he said. "I been trying to tell you."

Gabriel Mercredi had long grey hair and a curved pipe that smelled like the previous century, and everyone nodded as if they thought he should know about dames. He only picked up his glass and said, "It is not good to love a riverman."

Gabe was a pilot on the Sickanni Queen. He'd brought the boat and her three barges into Yellowknife Bay that morning after coming up the Mackenzie from Aklavik.

When he put down his glass again he said, "Robina, she could tell you. Oh, it is hard not to love some rivermen. They are carefree and wild and full of laughter. But they are fickle too, like the wind on Great Slave Lake, and they come in and they leave again like the tide at Tuktoyaktuk. It is not good to love them."

"Just tell them what happened," Little Joe said. "You ain't telling them nothing."

So Little Joe explained himself.

They are landing at Aklavik on the down-river run and Johnny Muskeg was anxious to get ashore because he had a surprise for his girl. He was out on the forward barge with a heaving line in his hand – till all of a sudden he dropped it. And he started to unbutton his cuffs. Robina Stewart was on the shore all right. But she was standing farther back than usual. And she was hooked onto some government clerk's right arm as if she was afraid he'd fall into the river.

"The way I got it figured," Little Joe said, "all you got to do is stay away from women. Completely! Just use your head. Just never start anything, that's all."

"The way it began," Gabe said, "we were pulling into Aklavik – not this last time, but two seasons before. It was something like last time, in a way, only Johnny had never met Robina, and we weren't pushed for time. It was turning dark and there was no moon, so we couldn't try the Oniak Channel till dawn. Our boat and three barges were tying up for the night. The boys were happy to have a night ashore. Oh, I went ashore too, but you know, I can only talk and remember. Some of the old women smile when they meet me, and they look away. I was young once, too."

"Yeah, a long time ago," Little Joe said. "But we were tying up in Aklavik two seasons before and so what?"

"So," Gabe went on, "when the forward barge was close to shore our Johnny Muskeg, he made a jump. Like a flying squirrel. He lit on solid ground and ran up the shore with the headline and found a deadman. He made the line fast and waved his arm and the deck hands on the capstan began to take in the slack.

"While Johnny waited he looked around. Everyone meets a boat, you know. The Eskimo boys were watching from the deck of a schooner, and the Indian boys were in a group on the shore, squatting on their haunches. And all the girls were there, standing together, silent and never missing a thing. Very nice, they looked, their mukluks embroidered with colored silk and some of them wearing parka hoods and fur trimming on their dresses. Johnny, he looked mostly at those girls. He was wondering.

"It was then he noticed the girl with the fair hair.

"You know, most of us along the river have a little of the native blood – Slavey or Loucheux or Husky – and it is not often you see one with native blood who is fair.

"She was tall ... not so tall, really, but she was slim as a fireweed and graceful, and it made her seem tall. And her fair hair was parted in the middle and combed straight back right down to her waist. Her lips were sad and full, and her eyes, like those almonds you have at Christmastime, they were dark – violet, Johnny said later, like the ribbons at the back of her head. The rest of us noticed her too.

"For a gangplank the deck hands shoved out a long two-by-six, narrow and springy, but Johnny Muskeg, in moccasins and a red-plaid shirt and with a knife on the back of his belt, he came strutting up like a peacock bird. I was watching from the pilot-house. The girls on the bank, they were watching too, and wondering.

"You know, the girls in the trading posts, they are shy and they are not so shy. It is hard to say. They are not like the women in Vancouver or Edmonton. They do no wonder if you have a good job or a new car or if you work hard. Life is too short. There is only one night and they wonder what you can do with one night only. It is difficult to say, sometimes."

"Don't the problem work both ways?" said Little Joe. But the old river pilot took a long drag on his pipe and laid down a smoke screen.

"That night our Johnny Muskeg put on his mail-order boots and he cut himself three times with his razor because he was singing while he shaved. The washroom is small and I was waiting.

"Maybe on the whole Mackenzie there was no one to come into port like our Johnny Muskeg. He could splice a line or dance a jig or carry more bales of fur than two other men put together. But best of all, he could love. It was always the same. In Fort Simpson waiting to try the Green Island Rapids, in Fort Norman waiting for a shipment of pitchblende from Great Bear, in Hay river or Fort Smith; all the girls knew when the Sickanni Queen was in. Eh, what a man!

"We left Aklavik by the early dawn," Gabe went on. "We went down to the Arctic coast and then we came upstream again, and one night we tied up in Fort Simpson. There are some pretty girls in Fort Simpson. I could tell you a lot. But when we tied up to the shore, Johnny Muskeg was not on deck with the headline. He was not in the washroom getting shaved. That was a funny thing.

After that he was not so full of the devil. And he always worked twice as hard when we loaded freight for Aklavik. Oh, he went out a little. A man is a man, you know. But the other girls all complained. That is bad, eh? They said it was not the same Johnny Muskeg."

"He was gone on this Robina," Little Joe said when he finally managed to get a word in edgewise. "I was telling you about our last trip. You see, for two years he'd been playing up to her every chance he got. They sort of planned to get married. So when he saw her with this government clerk he told me he was going to march ashore and take a poke at somebody and then maybe he'd spank somebody else. But before he could roll up his sleeves the skipper hailed us on the loudspeaker and told us to come up to the pilothouse.

"The skipper is a hard man. He opened up as we stepped through the door. 'It's sic o'clock on the dot, boys. I want you to get that freight off. We're leaving her at midnight sharp!'

"You see, Johnny Muskeg was the acting mate and he had to push the crew, and I was his sidekick.

"'I've got to go ashore and straighten out some personal affairs,' Johnny said. 'It might take a little longer, if you don't mind.'

"The skipper banged his fist down on the table and a pair of binoculars and a deck of cards jumped about a foot. 'The Sickanni Queen sails at midnight, come hell or high water!'

"Johnny felt like a good-natured bear in a tough corner. Without even raising his voice he said, 'I'll jump ship.'

"'You jump,' the skipper said, 'and you won't fly out from Yellowknife at the end of this trip. You won't go out to Vancouver to write for your mate's ticket, and I'll see to it that you're a deck hand for the rest of your life.'

"'I've got business,' Johnny said. 'I can settle it by dawn.'

"'What kind of business?'

"'My girl, sir.'

"'Monkey business!"

"'No, sir. You're wrong.'

"Nobody ever talked back to the old man like that, and his big face looked like a bucket of red-oxide paint. He's an ex-deep-sea man from the Maritimes and he's tougher than a marlin spike. 'This boat sails at midnight, business or no business, crew or no crew. This ain't a honeymoon cruise. Now get that freight off!'

"We went out on deck and I noticed and so did Johnny that Robina and the clerk had disappeared."

"I heard the argument," Gabe said.

"It was a shame. That midnight sun is a problem, you know. A man needs a little darkness with a woman and then he can find his courage. On our trip before that the sun didn't set all night. But now the summer was far enough gone to give us some darkness that was dark. I did not want to sail at midnight because the channels are shallow and my old eyes are not so quick to see a ripple or a snag. But the young fellows ... Ah, there was darkness and lots of girls and the promise of a moon, and after tonight there would be the lonely weeks on the river again. The skipper has not too soft a heart.

"Johnny was unloading lumber and bags of cement when I found him. 'Come with me,' I said. 'I've got some things to pick up and I need your help. The skipper won't say anything if he sees you with me.'"

Gabe was respected for his age and his wisdom, and his wisdom wasn't confined to the fifteen hundred miles of river that were memorized in his head. He and Johnny went ashore and they started looking for Robina.

They looked in at her home – her father was a white trapper who married a Loucheux girl. But Robina wasn't there. They searched the Anglican mission and the Catholic mission and a lot of places in between including a graveyard and a field of oats. The traders were closed up for the night, so they went into the shacks and tents along the shore. They smelled sealskin boots and polar bearskin trousers and caribou parkas and a few barrels of muktuk made from the corpses of white whales. But there wasn't a whiff of the perfume that Johnny won at a bingo game in Yellowknife. It was beginning to look hopeless. They even went aboard an Eskimo mud scow that was tied up near the Sickanni Queen. On the scow they found two families of Eskimos and thirteen sled dogs. They found a pile of white fox skins, two canoes and a new sewing machine ... but no sign of Robina.

And then, when they finally gave up, they found her. Gabe really did have something to pick up, though it hardly required two men. He wanted to find a sleeping bag he'd lent to greenhorn student going down to join a survey party. The student traveled down the river with them on the previous trip and couldn't get any equipment until he joined his party near Aklavik.

Gabe and Johnny walked into a small office to see if the sleeping bag had been sent into town, and the young lady who looked up from the desk was Robina Stewart.

The long fair hair that Johnny used to braid was cut short and worn curly in the latest fashion."Good evening," Robina said. "Could I help you?" She was wearing a new blue sweater that wasn't a half size too big, and before she stood up she tugged at the bottom of the sweater. She seemed taller than usual, and Johnny's eyes followed the tight grey skirt down toward the floor. Instead of mooseskin mukluk embroidered in silk thread, she was wearing high heels. "Could I help you?" she said again, and she smiled a little.

Then Johnny smiled too. "Hey, that's a pretty classy rig. Think you could manage to go for a walk?"

"I can't right now, Johnny. Honestly. This report has to go out to Ottawa tonight or else."

"What time do you think you'll have it finished?' he asked her.

"Not before midnight, I'm afraid. Probably a little after."

"Midnight be damned! I mean – excuse me." Johnny rubbed his nose and squinted at her make-up as if he wasn't sure it was Robina – the girl he was going to spank. "Look here, I haven't got much time. Maybe you could make allowances. Ottawa wouldn't know ..."

Robina had sat down again and now she began to type.

Johnny stared at her like an owl. "Hey, where did you learn to run that thing?"

"Alwin taught me."

"Alwin! Who the – who's Alwin?"

"He works in the next office. He's from a big city in Ontario. Kingston, or something. He's a clerk now and if he gets a promotion he might get a good job with the department in Ottawa."

"Where will I find this Alwin?"

"He's gone out to look for a bush pilot who came in this afternoon. One of our survey parties lost some equipment in a canoe accident."

"When'll he be back?"

"It depends on when he find the bush pilot. He'll be back for our date tonight."

"What time is that?"

"Midnight or shortly after."

"Here?"

"No, in his apartment."

"Oh, one of those deals."

Robina's head snapped up from the typewriter. "Alwin is a gentleman and a very decent boy."

"Well, three cheers for Alwin. But he isn't half as decent as if he's going to be when I get finished with him."

"Don't you dare touch him."

"Look, Robina."

"Call me Robbie, please."

"Well I'll be – look, Robin – Robbie. Speaking of apartments, I mean. I bought a house."

"Oh." Robina's voice was the peep of a baby bird looking at its first worm.

"Yeah, you should see it," Johnny said. " A real dandy. At my home in Fort Simpson. Made of peeled logs. You could do a lot with it. There's some furniture in it already – a stove and a table and a bed. What else do we really need" There's enough soil around the cabin for a little garden and out back there's a place to keep dogs."

Robina was silent. She fidgeted with the waist of her skirt as if something underneath was too tight.

"You follow me?" Johnny said. "Our boat'll be there quite a few times in the summer. And all winter I'll be home. Sounds good, eh? And guess what! I'm flying out from Yellowknife when we get back this trip. I've never been outside before and the company's sending me to Vancouver to write for my mate's ticket. I'll be making good money in the summer from now on, and in the winter I can trap or something. How does that suit you?"

Robina started hammering on the same key like a woodpecker. "Alwin wants to marry me."

"Hey, what goes on while I'm away?" Johnny couldn't believe what she was saying. He walked around behind her chair and picked her up and sad her on the desk. "Don't spill the ink," she said. He tipped her face up and kissed her lightly and then he was going to do it again, only more so, when all of a sudden she pushed him back and slapped at his bare arm.

"That's just like you, Johnny Muskeg. That's all you want."

"What're you talking about? And just watch who you slap."

"You know what I'm talking about."

"Look, I like you. I mean – how else does a guy prove it?"

"That's what I'm saying, Johnny. That's exactly the way it's been for two years. Always this love-making ... and never any love."

"Well, how else – what does this Alwin guy do?"

"He respects me. He's got a decent job and he's working hard to save money and he thinks about the future."

"Wait a minute, now. Wait a minute. I never missed a meal yet. Oh, once in a while, maybe."

"You don't understand. You don't see what a girl wants."

"I think I know what a girl wants. I got no written testimonials like in those magazines you read, but I could name a few satisfied customers."

Johnny tired again to kiss her and she caught at his shirt front and pushed him back.

"Where d'you get these fancy ideas?" Johnny said. "From this Alwin guy, eh?"

"He loves me."

"Well, isn't that too sweet of him. I'll bet he loves popcorn too. I'll go bring in the pieces and I want to hear you say that you love him."

"Go away, Johnny. You're just messing everything up. I've got to finish this report."

"How about when you finish?"

"I've got a date ... Oh, maybe. Go away now. Please, Johnny."

"Yeah, yeah, I'll go away. But I'll be back. Just don't forget."

Johnny's high boots, with the trouser cuffs tucked into the tops, stamped across the floor.

Miss Steward began doing something to her typewriter because all the key seemed to come up at the same time when the door slammed, and while she was busy Gabe picked up his sleeping bag and followed after Johnny. Gave had to catch him before he got into trouble. Aklavik was full of Mounties that day. Three of them.

"But I caught him," little Joe said. "He was coming onto the barge like a rutting bull moose and I dropped a sack of cement in front of him and asked him where the fire was."

Little Joe explained how he calmed Johnny down.

"I'm jumping ship," Johnny said.

Little Joe reasoned with him. "If you jump ship you'll never be a mate nor a skipper on this river. And that's all you've ever wanted to be since the first time you saw a riverboat; since the first time you wondered what's around the next bend in this old Mackenzie. So why jump ship? You got some screws loose?"

"If I don't jump ship Robina will be married the next time I come back."

"So what?"

"What d'you mean, so what?"

"I mean women are a dime a dozen."

"Not Robinas, they ain't."

"Tell her to wait until winter. Then you come back at freeze-up and you move in again. Where's the old touch?"

"It won't work, Joe. She'll marry this guy, and she'll marry him for keeps. Robina's like that. But if I stayed now I could get her back. I think this Alwin guy is missing a lot of the best things in life."

"Get to work and while you're working think about it," Little Joe said. "The old man is going to come storming down on us any minute. You're the acting mate, remember?"

Johnny picked up three sacks of cement and carried them down the gangplank. He set them down so hard that one sack burst and the cement puffed out and covered his best pair of trousers with grey dust.

"He worked for three hours," Gabe said. "He worked like a wheel dog until eleven o'clock, and then he stopped just the way he started.

"It was a little past twilight and the Richardson Mountains had disappeared into a kind of a grey gloom, but it wasn't dark enough so we couldn't travel. That was too bad. The silver Imperial Oil tanks on the shore beside our boat were ghosts, and the men unloading the barge were all shadows, except for the noise they made. I was sitting on a keg of nails smoking my pipe, and Johnny came over to where I was sitting.

"'We'll be finished by midnight,' he said.

"'The skipper'll be here at midnight and ready to go,' I told him. 'He's gone ashore for a spell.'

"'I'm going ashore too,' Johnny said. 'I've got to find this Alwin and tell him to keep off my trap line.'

"'I looked for him, Johnny, just to get closer look than I got when we were landing. But I couldn't find him anywhere.'

"'I'll bet he's in his apartment by now. He's meeting Robina there in less than an hour.'

"'It's up to you,' I said. 'Just be here by midnight.'

"'Maybe,' Johnny said. 'But if I don't make it, throw my gear ashore, will you?'

"He had made up his mind so it was no use arguing. I nodded my head.

"He turned around and walked down the gangplank.

"I called to Little Joe and when he came over I said, 'Go with him, Little Joe. Don't let him try to settle anything with those big fool muscles of his. It won't work in this place.'"

Little Joe followed after and caught up to him at the Corps of Signals office. They went in and asked where Alwin lived, since there was sure to be only one Alwin in the settlement, and the corporal on duty told them where to go.

The apartment was in a new government building. Johnny and Little Joe went in and found the right door and knocked. They waited, and after a moment Johnny tried the doorknob. No one answered and he got suspicious, knowing what he'd be doing in a setup like that, and he knocked again. He knocked four times. Suddenly he dropped his shoulder against the door and the door sprang open.

Johnny switched on the light and stepped in.

The apartment was empty.

Little Joe closed the door and stood inside in case anyone should try to investigate the noise. He took his cap off and watched.

"So this is Alwin's shack," Johnny said. "Sure is quite a place."

He flung open a closed door and stuck his head into what turned out to be a closet. A pair of skis standing in one corner still wore a C.O.D. tag. A tweed topcoat and a suede leather jacket were hung on wire hangers. "You got no working clothes, eh, Alwin?" When do you find time for all this sporting around?"

Johnny kicked at a full laundry bag and bent to examine a new pair of tennis shoes that lay on the floor. "Be no good on an oily deck."

He straightened up and half closed the door and stopped. "What you got here?" Three parallel springs hung from a nail and Johnny found the springs had a handle at each end. He took the two handles and stretched the springs a few times, like elastic, and then he hung them back on the nail.

On a small desk there was a writing pad, a month-old Toronto newspaper, and a pile of blank forms that apparently had something to do with Alwin's work. On the wall above the desk was a series of pennants – the kind for sale in train stations. Johnny read them aloud: "Toronto, Sudbury, Port Arthur, Kenora, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton." He touched one of them as if it was a dead moth. "You must have seen a lot of places, Alwin. And now you think you're taking Robina out there. I got a surprise for you."

He opened and closed his fist. "If he comes to the door, Little Joe, make sure he doesn't get away. We'll see what those muscle builders did for him."

Johnny sat down on an easy chair and when he sank deep into the cushion he laughed. "I could sit here all night and wait for you, Alwin. And if Robina get here fist she can join me."

He picked up a book that listed a hundred careers for young men. After a few pages he got restless and jumped up.

In the bedroom he turned on a dim light above the bed and looked at the pictures on the walls: purple birds he had never seen before. "What a deal," he said. He tried to operate the venetian blinds. "It's a little better than my shack all right. But so what? Make a man soft."

He disappeared into the bathroom and a moment later his voice echoed out to Little Joe, "Did you ever see a pink bathroom? And these towels would make good blankets ... Hey, look in here. He's got more hair tonics and shave lotions that that drugstore in Yellowknife. There's even some stuff here to stop – let's see – body perspiration. Boy, he must be the latest thing out."

Johnny came out of the bathroom rubbing a skin lotion into his hands. "I'm softening my knuckles for Alwin. I wouldn't want to ruin his complexion."

He brushed the cement dust off the easy chair and sad down again. "There are two towels in there. One marked HIS and one marked HERS. Only the HERS one has never been used. The guy is like that new engineer we got: he's all theory."

Johnny was quiet for a long while. Then he said, "Come to think of it, a pink bathroom wouldn't be so silly with a woman in it. Kind of nice, in fact. Too bad there's no bathroom in that shack I bought. I'd get a can of pink paint."

"Maybe we should get out," Little Joe said. "This snooping is against the law, you know. And if I ever got a written invitation I must have lost it."

Johnny ignored him. "Robina wouldn't look too bad prancing around inher high heels on a thick heavy rug like that one. Maybe I could order one for our place. You could almost use a rug like that for a sleeping bag."

"Let's go," Little Joe said. "It's nearly a quarter to."

Johnny got up and walked into the kitchen. Above the clatter of pans he called to Little Joe, "You should see this layout. An electric stove instead of one like I bought. You wouldn't have to haul wood or split it or anything with this outfit. Just learn to run these knobs. The women in these places must stay good-looking forever."

He opened and slammed a heavy door. "You should see this refrigerator, Joe. As big as the one we got on the boat, and it's all for one man. Or for his family, if he manages to get one. Imagine, eh? When you catch some fish you could keep them in here as long as you like and maybe you wouldn't have to smoke them or dry them or anything. What would you do with all your spare time?"

Again he opened a door. "This guy's got a whole trading post, Joe." He paused as if he was waiting for someone to say grace. "There's enough groceries here to last a whole winter. I'll bet this Alwin never missed a meal in his life. What a job he must have. I don't even see a rifle around the place. A girl would have a barrel of fun cooking in here, eh. He's even got canned potatoes. Maybe we should cook ourselves a feed?"

"The skipper won't wait for us," Little Joe said.

"Alwin," Johnny said, talking to the pantry as if he was talking to a man, "I don't know what you've got in your hand, but you've sure got some nice cards on the table. You run a nice bluff."

"Hey, Johnny," Little Joe called. "I'm a river rat and I aim to go on being one. This place is too high-class for me."

Johnny turned the kitchen light off and on a few times. "I've got to scrape up a few bucks for a keg of coal oil and some groceries." He laughed. "If Robina won a pot like this she'd never have to worry about –"

Johnny stopped.

"Are you coming, Johnny?"

Johnny didn't answer.

"Are you coming with me?"

Little Joe only heard the whirr of the refrigerator.

"I'm going," Little Joe said. "You got less than fifteen minutes. Hurry up, Johnny."

Gabe was putting Johnny Muskeg's gear on deck beside the gangplank when Little Joe came out of the dark.

"Where's Johnny?" Gabe said.

He's waiting to clean up on Alwin and talk to Robina, and mostly he's snooping where he shouldn't and talking to himself."

"If he isn't here when the skipper yells to take in the headline and the gangplank, throw this bedroll and those two kit bags ashore. I'm going to my cabin to get my eyeglasses, and then I'm going up to the pilothouse."

Little Joe was staring into his empty glass and fingering the fuzz on his chin. When someone pushed a bottle of Calgary in front of him he shook his head. "It don't do nothing for me today."

Gabe tapped his pipe empty in a sardine can. "When I got up to the pilothouse the skipper was waiting for the all-clear signal. I remember. He was growling about the lazy deck hands. He had the telegraph set at SLOW AHEAD to keep the garge close in until the man who let go the headline could get aboard.

"All of a sudden the headline went slack and Little Joe began to pull it in by hand.

"The shadow that came out of the darkness and up the gangplank was Johnny Muskeg. Like a bulldozer he came. When he saw his gear by the gangplank he swore and told a deck hand to take it down to the forecastle. He signaled all clear to the pilothouse.

"Two deck hands pulled in the gangplank and stopped to wave at a couple of native girls who were waving back as we drifted away from the shore. Johnny swore again. He told the deck hands to get the barges looking shipshape and if that was finished to scrub down the galley. They looked surprised and left the girls waving at nothing.

"I noticed about that time that the moon was coming up.

"Then Johnny turned on Little Joe. 'Haven't you learned yet how to coil a line? Look alive, man! It'll take a week to get that mess untangled, and you should be ready on the bow with a sounding pole. This ain't a honeymoon cruise!'

"It was a funny thing, eh? We were away a few minutes ahead of schedule, and that never happened before. That John McKeg – that's his real name – he will be a great skipper someday. He'll be the greatest skipper on the river."

MRS. BRENNAN'S SECRET

Even as Louie sat in her kitchen for the first time

he knew what his police badge compelled him to do - now that they'd found out

why her egg crates gurgled

Louie Zimmel never got married. A horse kicked his left knee and smashed it when he was nineteen years old, and the accident cost him his only girl friend. She was ashamed to go dancing with a boy who had a crippled leg, and in two months she was married to a Watkins man who would tap his foot to the song of a meadowlark. Louie, thirty years later, was still single. He still walked with a limp, and he was scared to death of women.

That is why he tried to look busy when Mrs. Cash, the new hotelkeeper's wife, burst into his egg-grading station to make her accusation.

"Do you know what that Mrs. Brennan is up to?" Mrs. Cash demanded. She raised her elbows like a hawk sunning its wings in the early morning.

Louie, the egg-grading man and town policeman, had known for twenty-eight years what Mrs. Brennan was up to. He crossed his good knee over his bad one and lifted an egg to the candling light. "What's she up to?" he said.

"She's bootlegging."

"Now, now," said Louie.

"Now, now!" said Mrs. Cash, her voice rising like the sound of wine being run into a bottle. "I said, she's bootlegging!"

Louie returned the A-large egg to its container. "Evidence," he said, picking up the same egg again. "Mrs. Cash, rumors are rumors, but evidence is evidence. How can you honestly make such a charge?"

Mrs. Cash ran her long thin hands down over her flat chest and stepped from the doorway of the office into the egg-grading room. "Mr. Zimmel. Do you remember when that witch of a woman brought in her eggs?"

Louie nodded. He remembered her footsteps on the wooden sidewalk that morning, as he had remembered for thirty long years the way she said his name, the color of her eyes and their last dance together.

Mrs. Cash closed the insulated wooden door with DO NOT ENTER printed across the front. "She left a crate in your office an hour ago."

"She does every week," Louie said.

"I sent my husband over for some eggs, and he took those by mistake."

"They were for the storekeeper."

"There was a note in the top that said as much."

When Louie spoke again his voice was trying to be calm under the woman's shrill assurance. "Mrs. Brennan doesn't own a hotel. Maybe the eggs were in payment of her debts."

"That's right," said Mrs. Cash. Her teeth flashed in the semi-darkness. "And so were the four bottles of chokecherry wine in the bottom of the crate. Try to explain that away!"

Louie dropped the egg he was holding. But it was almost as if he had thrown it.

For years he had noticed a gurgling sound in Mrs. Brennan's egg crates. The storekeeper sold a number of ungraded eggs, and insisted on getting those from Mrs. Brennan's hens. He had never explained why, and Louie had preserved a kind of innocence by never asking. When a man buys his eggs ungraded it implies a gentlemen's agreement - a mutual acceptance of the good with the bad - and as the eggs were never lifted to a candling light, so the lid of the crate was never lifted to show why the eggs gurgled.

"This is a breach of provincial law," said Mrs. Cash. "It's a matter for the

Mounties. And if you don't have them in town by two o'clock, I'll get them myself."

"Mrs. Brennan couldn't pay a fine," Louie said. "You'll be sending her to jail."

Mrs. Cash snorted and opened the big door. "She's breaking the law."

"And she's supporting herself," said Louie, pushing back his chair. "She hasn't cost the taxpayers a cent since her husband disappeared into the north."

Mrs. Cash stepped into the tiny office that opened onto the street. "The law is the law, Mr. Zimmel."

"God dixie, woman!" Louie moved his stiff knee and struggled up from his chair. "Mrs. Brennan is in a tough spot. Try and do her justice."

"Justice!" said Mrs. Cash. "Don't you get fifty dollars a month for being the town policeman?"

"Sure"- Louie waved his hands, searching for an explanation -"sure I'm the town policeman. But listen to common sense-"

Mrs. Cash went through the open front door and stepped down onto the wooden sidewalk. "I have the evidence locked up in our cooler."

"Just think about it," Louie called."You got to think about feelings a little.You're sending a neighbor woman to jail."

A dog started up from the shade under the sidewalk, but Mrs. Cash, without glancing to either side, marched stiffly across the dusty street.

Louie slammed the door and reached for the broom and dustpan to clean up the egg. His cap was hanging on the handle of the broom. He took the cap and tried to straighten the broken brim. After a moment he swore softly, and he flopped the cap onto his head.

As he stepped out onto the sidewalk, shading his eyes from the sun. Mrs. Cash pretended not to have been watching and disappeared into the square, two-story hotel that was the town's only brick building.

Louie slapped his pockets, looking for his ring of keys. All he could find was his badge.

When the chokecherries were ripe along the Battle River, Mrs. Brennan would drive down to her secret places in an old buggy, and she would pick two milk pails and a cream can full of chokecherries. Then she would get sugar and yeast from the storekeeper, on credit, and she would make wine. When the dandelions were in bloom, she would walk along the railroad track and pick the yellow blossoms until she had filled a gunny sack. For hours there would be a copper boiler and a galvanized washtub sitting on her stove, and she would be out splitting wood on a hot day. Or when the rhubarb was ready along the north fence of her garden, she would go out and fill apple box after apple box with fresh, juicy, mouth-twisting rhubarb. And one evening as the sun went down behind the town's five grain elevators, she would lift a brass funnel from bottle to bottle, and she would pour a long stream of wine from an old granite water dipper, into the funnel.

Mrs. Brennan was always busy.

But now, today, as Louie approached the big unpainted house where she lived alone, everything seemed suddenly deserted. The house and chicken coop were set behind a poplar grove on a corner of town land that was virgin prairie, and Louie came upon them unexpectedly. Where the founders of the town had dreamed that skyscrapers would grow, an old horse was drowsing in the sun. Chickens bathed and slept in the dust beneath the caragana hedge, and everything was so still that Louie felt he was driving into an ambush.

When he braked his jalopy to a stop in front of the porch, there was still no sign of Mrs. Brennan.

Quickly he turned off the ignition and climbed out of the Model A. He had sawed off the back end of the car and had built a small box over the hind wheels, and now, urgently, he lifted a sack of oyster shells out of the box, as if to sandbag an emplacement in the face of enemy fire.

"Why, Louie!"

Louie twisted on his bad leg as if someone had touched his ribs with a knife.

Mrs. Brennan was standing at a corner of the house, holding up the bottom of her apron, a grape basket full of eggs on her free arm, a smile bright on her brown face.

"Here's a sack of oyster shells," Louie said. He noticed that her nose was peeling a little from the sun.

"Oyster? ... Well, thank you," Mrs. Brennan said. She tried to move one of her hands.

"Wait." Louie dropped the oyster shells and snatched off his cap and began to put the eggs from Mrs. Brennan's apron into his cap. "You're probably wondering what brought me." He stopped to pick some straw out of his cap. "I was driving out this way ... and the storekeeper mentioned you could use some oyster shells."

Mrs. Brennan nodded her agreement. When she could let go of her apron she picked an egg out of the basket and held it up. "Look at this." The shell had been cracked by the weight of the hen's body. "It's my Leghorns," she said. "They need calcium or something."

"Wouldn't that frost you," Louie said, looking away from her dark brown eyes, which were not concerned with the egg. He picked up the sack of oyster shells and set it on the porch beside the skate blade that was used to scrape shoes.

"I appreciate your doing this," Mrs. Brennan said. "... But I haven't got a penny in the house right now." She brightened again. "Maybe I could give you—"

"No, no, no!" Louie protested. "Not at all." He had told himself he would find an excuse, he would lessen the trouble. And now all she did was offer more evidence. He handed her the cap full of eggs and started to get into the Model A. "I just wanted to ... I really ..." Again he stopped.

"I'm fixing dinner right this minute," Mrs. Brennan said. "At least you can stay for a bite to eat."

Louie tugged at a shoe lace fastened to his belt and brought out his watch. It was 11.30 a.m. The RCMP detachment was forty miles away, and he would have to allow them an hour for the drive. "It's nearly dinnertime," he said. "I guess I better hustle along."

"Come in and sit down for a minute," Mrs. Brennan said. She indicated that he would have to open the door. "You can't be in that big a hurry."

Without giving Louie a chance to reply, she led him into the house and offered him a chair by the kitchen table. She put the eggs in the pantry and stuck a piece of wood in the fire. After she had moved the tea kettle, she began to stir a pot of stew that was simmering on the back of the stove.

"Where do you eat your meals now?" she asked, lifting a wooden spoon full of small onions and bits of carrot and rich chunks of beef.

"I still live at the hotel," Louie said. He noticed some chokecherries in a Roger's syrup pail sitting on the table. "There's nowhere else to stay."

"I hear some new people took over the hotel."

"A fellow by the name of Cash came down from the city. He runs the beer parlor and his wife runs everything."

"I hope she's a good cook," Mrs. Brennan said.

Louie sniffed the peppery aroma of the stew, and when Mrs. Brennan turned her head, he reached over and scooped up a few chokecherries. They were big and shiny and almost black-ripe, and in a moment his mouth puckered deliciously to their astringent sweetness. "If you like lumpy mush and lumpy mashed potatoes, she's the best cook in town."

"That settles it," Mrs. Brennan said. She set a loaf of homemade bread on the end board from an apple box. "You're staying for dinner."

"No." Louie shook his head. "We eat at twelve, and I want to get back and wash up." He looked around at the bright clean kitchen and thought of his musty room at the top of the hotel stairs, the dimly lit bathroom at the end of the hall. "I got to get back."

"Now, Louie," Mrs. Brennan said. "You ought to stop long enough to tell me about this Mrs. Cash you're so anxious to get back to."

"Well..." Louie blushed and shifted the chokecherries in his mouth. When he spoke his teeth showed a purple tint. "If nothing else, she knows how to squeeze a nickel. She cut down on help the day after she moved in, and she's always counting how many glasses of beer her husband gets out of a keg."

Mrs. Brennan put some homemade raspberry jam and a lump of butter on the table. There were drops of water on the butter and it looked fresh and cool.

Louie shifted to the edge of his chair. "If she hears somebody is buying drinks somewhere besides in the hotel beer parlor, she says she'll put a stop to it."

"Tea or coffee?" Mrs. Brennan asked.

"Huh?"

"What'll you drink?"

"Maybe ... I got to go," Louie said. He spit the chokecherry stones into his hand and dropped them in the woodbox.

"It's too late for maybe," Mrs. Brennan said. "Tea or coffee?"

Louie watched as she set two places at the table. "Coffee," he said. "But I guess 1 better wash up first."

"You got lots of time."

Louie looked around. "Whereabouts?" he said.

"That's right," Mrs. Brennan said. She looked at him quickly. "You've never been here before."

"This is the first time," Louie said, looking down at the worn linoleum.

"The wash basin is behind there." Mrs. Brennan pointed at a door across the kitchen. "But the water pail's empty, Louie. If you went out and got a pail, dinner would be ready by the time you washed."

"Be glad to," Louie said. He shifted his stiff leg and started to get up.

Mrs. Brennan noticed his efforts and hastened to interrupt, "Oh, excuse me, Louie. Just sit down. I can get it in a minute."

"It's no trouble, honest," Louie said. He stumbled, hurrying to get the water pail, and a moment later he unhooked the back screen door and went out toward the pump.

When they had finished eating, Louie looked at his watch again.

Mrs. Brennan turned from the table lo look at the clock sitting on top of the cabinet. "Mrs. Cash will be giving you up," she said. "It's ten to one."

"I got a quarter to," Louie said. He had been trying for the past hour to get on the subject of bootlegging. Mostly, as town policeman, he had to keep the men from standing on the dance floor when there was a dance in the Elk's Hall, or at the annual sports day he would show people where to park their cars.

"That's a fancy timepiece you got there," Louie said, nodding toward the kitchen cabinet.

The clock on the cabinet had a shiny face with Roman numerals, an elaborate brass pendulum, and a tiny system of weights, all mounted inside a glass dome.

"It's twenty-some years old," Mrs. Brennan said. "My husband sent it to me one Christmas from up north."

Louie looked down at the plate he had just wiped clean with his last piece of bread. "Guess he's not likely to come . . ."

"I don't imagine so."

Louie glanced again at the clock. "But maybe he could send you a few dollars if you mentioned it."

"I don't know where he is," Mrs. Brennan said.

"Then you ought to" - Louie hesitated - "you ought to see a lawyer. Maybe . . . according to the law, maybe you ain't bound -"

"Law!" Mrs. Brennan said. "What kind of a law is that, Louie?"

Louie scratched himself under the arm. "I mean, he ain't fussy about settling down."

"I'm married to him," Mrs. Brennan said.

Louie toyed with his fork. This was the first time in his life that he had eaten a meal alone in a house with a woman, and he thought of the man who could eat with this woman every meal, and didn't.

Mrs. Brennan got up from the table. "Guess I better get the dishes cleared away."

Louie started to get up.

"Just sit still," Mrs. Brennan said. "Want some more, coffee?"

"No, no thank you. This is fine." He raised the empty cup to his lips as if there was something in it.

When Mrs. Brennan turned away, he fumbled for his pipe. He unrolled a long leather pouch and tamped the pipe full of tobacco, and while Mrs. Brennan dipped hot water from the reservoir with a tomato can, he struck a series of wooden matches on the bottom of his chair.

Louie had never enjoyed himself this way before. Now, watching from behind his pipe, he admired the surface of the flowered yellow oilcloth, beginning to glisten as Mrs. Brennan wiped it clean. Drowsily he listened to the clink of knives and forks and spoons dropped one by one from a dish towel into a drawer. He looked about, lazily, and approved the neat array on the cabinet shelves: the cups, the saucers, the gilt-edged china.

For once in his life he didn't have to hurry out of the dining room, back to the insulated walls of his egg-grading station. When Mrs. Brennan flung the dishwater out the back door and disappeared into the pantry, he balanced his pipe on the clean oilcloth, and for a minute he let himself doze off, into a pleasant sleep.

Wake up!" Mrs. Brennan said. "You come to see me so seldom, I think you deserve a little treat."

Louie started and looked about.

There before him on the table was a glass of chokecherry wine.

"What time is it?" Louie asked.

"A little after one. You're not leaving?"

"I got to phone the police," Louie blurted.

"What's the matter?" Mrs. Brennan said.

Louie looked away and didn't answer. He thought of Mrs. Cash, of the four bottles of wine locked up in a cooler and waiting for the Mounties. He thought of the note on the crate of eggs. He had kept those things out of his mind for a few minutes and now they burst back in again. He had known all the time that he could not change those things, had known even while he fooled himself in his anger; and now, his predicament admitted, he could admit to himself why he was here.

Mrs. Brennan sat down on the opposite side of the table. "That's why you came?" she said. She slumped a little.

"You got to understand," Louie said.

"That's why you came, Louie. After all these years, that's why. It wasn't for those oyster shells at all."

"You got to try and understand." Louie picked up his cold pipe. "Mrs. Cash - she got hold of that last crate of eggs."

Mrs. Brennan didn't move.

"It was a mistake, see?" Louie said. "But she knew somebody in town was making wine, and every time somebody takes a drink of wine she figures there's a glass of beer she ain't selling."

"I can't pay a fine," Mrs. Brennan said.

"I know," Louie said.

They sat without speaking and Louie, mechanically, crossed his good leg over his stiff left knee. "If I don't phone right away, Mrs. Cash is going to phone. And she might get a lot of people in trouble."

"Everybody drinks my wine," Mrs. Brennan said.

"I thought maybe they did."

"In the winter," Mrs. Brennan said. "When they're playing Norwegian whist or a few hands of smear, or when somebody butchers, or when there's a blizzard on."

"I know, I know," Louie said. "That's why I got to phone."

Mrs. Brennan looked out the window at the old horse sleeping in the sun. "There's a phone in the parlor."

Louie didn't move.

"Why did you come out here to phone?" Mrs. Brennan said.

"I wanted to let you know," Louie said.

"I'm not blaming you," Mrs. Brennan said. "You couldn't know what was in that crate."

"It's not that." Louie cleared his throat and hesitated before he began. "Remember that time ... that time my knee got hurt?"

Mrs. Brennan's voice was small. "Yes."

"I just wanted you to know, I ain't doing this because of hard feelings."

Mrs. Brennan stopped him when he tried to get up and, without speaking, went into the parlor.

When Louie heard her ring for central, he picked up his glass of wine and drank it down. He liked the taste of the wine. But it was all gone in one swallow.

Mrs. Brennan came back into the kitchen. "Your party's on the line."

"I hope you understand," Louie said. With one hand he pushed himself up off the chair. At the parlor doorway he turned and looked at Mrs. Brennan. Again he noticed the skin on her nose was peeling.

"Louie," Mrs. Brennan said, "in all those years since - at least you could have dropped in for a visit. You could have just dropped in for a cup of coffee or a bite to eat."

Louie shook his head a little. "You could have mentioned it was okay, couldn't you?"

Mrs. Brennan did not have an answer and she turned away. Then she saw the empty glass on the table and she turned back to Louie in surprise.

Suddenly Louie smiled. He had a vision of Mrs. Cash with her head held high, staring straight ahead. At least it was not too late to mention that. "God dixie," he said. "You wouldn't have a couple of bottles of something I could take back to my room?"

After Mrs. Brennan returned his smile, he started walking again, limping toward the phone.

THE BLUE GUITAR

All his life, Ben sometimes felt, he had been trying to keep kids out of mischief. If they weren't climbing trees to steal crows' eggs, they were skiing down snow-covered strawpiles on barrel staves, and breaking their bones on the frozen horse turds at the bottom. There was always something. And now even his brother was siding with the kids.

"But what were they doing in a boxcar?" Ben insisted. "I warned those boys a dozen times."

"I know, Ben," Freddie said. Freddie was a stout, towering man, and now he was standing awkwardly at Ben's bedside. "You told them."

"Why don't they listen?" Ben pulled the handmade quilt up to his armpits. He had gotten up to answer when the knock came at his door. As soon as he recognized his brother by the light of the lamp, he turned without speaking, walked back to his bedroom, set the lamp on the dresser, and crawled back into bed.

"They were playing hobo," Freddie said. "The way kids do. Then they sneaked into your elevator to ride on the man-lift. And when they came out it was pitch dark, and somebody stepped on the guitar."

"And you'd buy him another one?"

"It's all the kid had." Freddie started to take off his dirty, crownless felt hat, but left it on. "Other kids got everything, Ben. But none of them had a guitar like my boy's."

"Your boy's!" Ben folded the embroidered pillow double to raise his head. "Ben Junior's, you mean. Say it. The last thing the damned young fool touched before he crawled onto a bucking horse and got himself killed."

Ben's son was recently dead, and his wife had died years earlier when a train struck a car in which she was a passenger. Yet Ben went on working every day in his grain elevator, saving every penny he earned. The Messner boys, as the town called the two brothers, seemed to be related in name only. For Freddie had a pregnant wife, a son, and three daughters, yet he piled up his debts first, then drayed or plowed gardens or hauled water or flooded the skating rink, or did whatever was exactly sufficient to pay the debts and leave a little beer money.

"He wasn't a damned fool," Freddie said, staring now at the worn hand-woven rug on the floor beside the bed. "People came from miles to stampedes, just to hear him sing."

"Blow out the lamp and get out," Ben said, a habitual insistence rising in his voice. He pointed at the coal oil lamp sitting on the dresser. The power line had come through town nine years earlier, but as long as electricity could be switched on or off at someone else's fancy, Ben wasn't going to have it in his house. Suddenly he turned his back to Freddie and pretended he was falling asleep. "Get out."

"I just want to tell you something first," Freddie said. He stepped back and leaned against the wall under a faded photograph of a sod shack. "You're the damned fool."

"He was a damned fool," Ben said. "Getting a saddle horn run through his belly."

"And you're a damned stingy tightwad," Freddie said.

"Because I won't lend you some money?"

"Because the kids call you Old Highpockets when you try to hire them to shovel wheat. Hell, the church ladies won't even ask you for beans any more when they hold a bean supper. You drove your own son out of his home."

"That's a lie," Ben said.

"He came to me," Freddie said. "To get ten dollars so he could pay the entry fee at his first stampede."

"That's a lie!" Ben rolled onto his back again.

"He was going to steal if he had to," Freddie said. "I didn't want a thief in the family."

"I offered him more than your boy will ever get."

"Ben Junior wanted to sing," Freddie said.

"Sing, you say! I offered him the best farm in the province. I would have bought him every acre I lost in the Depression."

"That was your notion," Freddie said. He swung carelessly at a moth that had gotten into the room and was flying in crazy circles toward the light. "He had a notion he could sing like nobody else in the world."

"And I suppose he had a notion he could ride any bucking horse?"

"He just tried it for the money," Freddie said, jingling some keys in the pocket of his faded blue denim jacket.

"He wasted money."

"He needed the money," Freddie said. "He had a chance to go on television, and he needed some decent clothes." "A cowboy outfit, I suppose," Ben said, closing an underwear button over his thin chest. "Why didn't you buy him that too?"

"I didn't have the money," Freddie said.

"And I suppose you bought his guitar for him?"

"If I had that kind of money, I wouldn't be here asking you for a loan."

"Loan! A handout. How much did you plan on _borrowing_ to buy a guitar?"

"A blue one like Ben Junior's will cost two hundred dollars."

"Two -" Ben flung back the quilt and leaped out of bed. "Two hundred dollars! That boy paid two hundred dollars for a guitar!"

"He wanted a good one."

"Two hundred dollars! He could have bought a heifer or some seed wheat."

"He could have," Freddie said, jingling his keys. "But a heifer wasn't the thing he wanted."

The crazily circling moth brushed Ben's cheek and he swung at it savagely. He was standing now barefoot in the middle of the room, dressed only in his summer-weight long underwear. He caught the moth and held it cupped in his callused hand.

"Ben Junior -" Freddie said. "The people came from miles just to hear him sing. My boy wants to be like that. He wants to sing."

"Let him get killed on a bronco too."

"I don't aim to have him ride," Freddie said, shifting from one foot to the other. "I got the job of flooding the rink this year. I'll have the money by spring."

Ben stood motionless. It was fall now, and the skating rink outside his back door was only a patch of dry weeds. In other years he had looked forward to the noise of children, the couples skating in the evening, the hockey game on a Saturday afternoon. At least then he knew where his son was. He remembered fondly young Ben taking off his shin pads, or taping a hockey stick, and he remembered the anguish of watching his son thaw out a frozen toe, or the moment's terror when a scream came from the rink.

Now Ben walked over to the coal oil lamp and dropped the moth into the plain glass globe. He stood slouched by the dresser, a small man, brushing the grey dust off his hand.

"I guess I'm like you in some ways," Freddie said, "no matter what people say."

"How on God's earth are you like me?"

Freddie pointed at the moth fluttering wildly inside the globe. "That way you can say the flame did it."

Bert grunted as if hit. "Get out!" he shouted. He held his hand to the top of the globe and blew out the lamp. "Go on! Get home!"

Freddie bumped the wall in the dark, then was gone out the door. A moment later there was the jingle of harness as the tugs jerked tight on the dray's doubletree; there was the quick muted clop of hoofs on the dirt street.

Ben slumped onto the edge of the bed. He twisted the old handmade quilt into his fists, caught his breath, listened.

Then he put his fists over his ears.

Even in the darkness he could hear the moth, breaking its wings on the hot glass.

DEFY THE NIGHT (EARTH MOVING)

It had begun to snow finally and, though no trucks rattled empty down the trail from the plain above the valley, Mrs. Kubichek, standing now on the rusty tracks at the hillside entrance to her small underground coal mine, ventured a private smile. Even when she saw a man on foot coming up from the valley bottom, she seemed to ignore him and started around the hoist engine and tipple, and she walked carelessly along the path toward her shack. But she saw the man come past the empty bunkhouse and noticed when he waved.

"What are you doing here?" she called.

Jake the Miner had plagued her for fourteen years. He spent his life panning and sluicing for gold in the worthless mud of the Battle River, and so far he had earned nothing but a mocking nickname. To keep himself alive until he struck it rich he trapped muskrats, cut willow fence posts, rustled an occasional calf from a local rancher before branding time, dug coal for a day or two - or, when he was really hard put, he set up a still and cooked a batch of moonshine. And in twenty years of assembling and concealing his piece of copper tubing and an old cream can, he had never found a better hide-out than a deserted room in the Black Jade Mine.

"What are you up to?" Mrs. Kubichek repeated.

This time Jake was within hearing distance. "I thought you might need an extra man."

"You never in your life came near a place when there was work to be done."

Jake grinned and set down the gunny sack he had been carrying. He was wearing a faded blue denim smock that showed holes in its four pockets, his pants and rubber boots were spattered with dry grey mud, and cocked forward on his head, its brim laden with snow, was a badly weathered straw hat. "What's the matter?" he said. "No work?"

"There'll be lots of trucks by morning," Mrs. Kubichek said. "My boys'll be back from the strip mine wanting their old jobs again."

Jake looked at her as if surprised that she didn't laugh at her own joke. "You haven't sold a truckload in a month."

"Wait until it turns cold."

"For God's sake, it's snowing!" Jake held out his ragged arms as if to catch an armful of flakes and show her. "So here you sit with picks and shovels while that outfit across the river is loading coal with draglines."

"Wait until morning," Mrs. Kubichek said. "There'll be trucks lined up clear back to the powder shack."

"They don't have to line up at the strip mine. They get loaded and off they go, and they sell their loads and come back for more."

"Go on! Get the devil going!"

"I'm going," Jake said.

"You're going! Ha! You got no place to go. After all these years you got nothing but a log cabin and two blankets."

"Where are _you_ going now?" Jake's small weathered face, beneath the straw hat that was too big, wrinkled into a grin again.

"You go!" Mrs. Kubichek said. She pulled the hood of her heavy woolen plaid parka closer around her face. Her voice now was as frantic and yet as quiet as the snowflakes that twisted down out of the sky. "The next time you show your nose around here, I'm calling the police. I raised a family while you haven't even looked after yourself."

"I brought you a couple partridges," Jake said. He picked up a bottom corner of the gunny sack, dumped out the two birds at her feet, and turned away.

The wind died down before evening, and as the sky cleared the temperature began to fall. All night Mrs. Kubichek lay and listened for the sound of truck brakes, the curses of men stepping down from warm cabs. In other years the truckers from the wheat farms and the prairie towns for fifty miles around had come to her mine for coal. They would arrive during the night, park their trucks in the loading line, then go to the tar paper bunkhouse outside the mine entrance: there they would kick off their boots and sleep fully clothed on the wooden bunks or sit drinking coffee and whiskey and play poker until the mine opened and their turns came to load. All night Mrs. Kubichek listened, hoping as she and her husband had hoped that night over twenty-two years before, after the day he dug and loaded and hoisted out of the mine the first ton of coal that was his own.

A coal miner and a coal miner's son, her husband left the big mines up in Crow's Nest Pass when he was laid off in the thirties. He vowed that his sons would not know such an experience, and he brought his wife and three sons out of the mountains, down onto the flat Alberta plains. He set out to find a store, a homestead, a construction job - anything but a coal mining outfit. And he came, by chance or instinct, to the Battle River.

Here he found an unexpected valley, a sudden valley, as if the frost of winter or the drought of summer had one night split the land. He explored the dry horseshoes, grown over with spruce and tamarack, crossed the dry flats and searched up the ravines and coulees, matted with saskatoons, poplars, and chokecherry bushes. He drove his spade into the reddish-grey eroded valley walls, always watching, always seeking. And when he found what he sought, he dug a slanting shaft down into the clay hillside and marked a trail across the prairie from the nearest town to the valley's edge - and he was again a miner. Eight years later, to the day, the mine that was his own killed him.

Now Rachel Kubichek lay and listened for the first trucks that had always come with the cold weather to buy coal. She listened impatiently, afraid for her pride in the mine and in her family, afraid for having laughed even when the strip miners offered her sons summer jobs. From across the valley tonight she could hear the clank of bulldozers peeling off the acres of clay, the grunt of a dragline scooping up four tons of coal at a swing.

She waited impatiently through the night, and when at last the sun rose, bursting the horizon's long seam, she touched her stockinged feet to the cold worn linoleum and hurried to the kitchen door. Across the valley there were new droppings of clay on the snow-covered mounds. There were columns of smoke rising stiffly into the sky above the strip mine. There was the distant clatter and noise as of magpies circling down onto carrion.

And at the Black Jade Mine the ground was white with snow, and the snow was banked and drifted and as new and old and trackless as Pre-Cambrian rock. At the loading chute, there were no trucks.

The strip miners had arrived unannounced one morning shortly after the first spring thaw. They had torn down a barbed wire fence, had moved into a stubble field, and half an hour later, with bulldozers and power shovels, they were digging their own valley. On the wide prairie horizon they were building their own hills.

Mrs. Kubichek called it the labor of fools - moving sixty feet of waste to lay bare a seam of coal. "Wait until it snows," she told her three sons, early in the summer. "Then we'll have trucks to load. Then they'll come hightailing back to us." And she had scoffed too heartily - for evening came now, on the day after the first snowfall, and still no trucks arrived.

When it was eight o'clock Rachel took the coal scuttle and went out to the mine to start the water pump and to feed the mine horse that was not supposed to leave the mine all winter. Snow had begun to fall again, but she could still find the path to the mine. She stopped at the hillside entrance to light her carbide cap-lamp. A cold wind was blowing from the north, and she hurried down into the warmth of the sloping shaft. Two hundred feet inside, at the bottom of the slope, she stopped and listened. She could hear water trickling, and her impulse was to start the pump. But first she would feed the horse.

She walked back to the room where the horse was stabled and dipped a pailful of oats out of a small bin. Then she heard the horse's rhythmic munching. Quickly she went to the feed box.

The horse had been fed.

"Joe!" she called, remembering her son who had most delighted in feeding the horse.

Her voice echoed back to her from the dark, timbered corridors and from the silent rooms. Nearby, a handful of coal dust whispered down from above a timber, cutting a shadow through the light from her cap-lamp.

She set down the coal scuttle and stepping between the slippery grey ties that led through the tunnel to the rooms she followed the track along which the horse had so often pulled five loaded coal cars to where they could be hooked onto the hoisting cable. She looked into each room – at the picks, the drills, the empty coal cars, the heaps of clay bone. Becoming a little frightened, she picked up a shovel.

Then she looked into the last room under the air shaft and saw him; a man sitting on a pile of hay, his boots off, his stockinged feet up against a small fire that flickered beneath a five-gallon cream can.

A coil of copper tubing curled from the lid and ran through a bucket of water, and at the end of the tube an empty whiskey bottle caught the slow drip, drip of alcohol.

Jake was toying with a lump of coal.

"What did I tell you?" Rachel demanded.

Jake had heard her coming and now he held up the lump of coal so that she could see it. On the lump was preserved a patterned outline.

The fossil glistened black and was clean of dust. It had a familiar look - almost like the tropical fern that Rachel kept hanging in the window of her living room. "So what?"

"Maybe things change."

"Change, you say?" Rachel remembered at that instant what Joe as a schoolboy had told her years before: this very bed of coal had once been a tropical inland sea. She thought of the winter above her, of the broad, snow-buried plain, and a picture came to her mind from one of Joe's school books: a painting of a luxuriant lagoon, of trees that were not poplar or spruce or balm of Gilead, of strange lizard-looking birds, of tropical ferns, of dinosaurs as huge as draglines, scooping up the green slime.

"No," she said. "How could they, Jake?"

"These new strip miners," Jake said. "They'll pay three dollars for a bottle of stuff that's been run through charcoal or a loaf of bread."

"Stuff!" Mrs. Kubichek pointed at the cream can like a mother pointing at a broken window. "What's this?"

"It ain't the best batch," Jake said. "Threw in too many potato peels - wait!"

Suddenly Mrs. Kubichek had raised up the shovel she was holding: before Jake could move, the shovel smashed into the cream can and upset it.

The spilled mash put out the fire, and Jake stumbled clear of the swinging shovel as the lamp on Mrs. Kubtchek's cap cut wild arcs through the dark. Tubes and bottles fell with a clattering, splintering violence: echoes pounded back from the corridors. Then suddenly she was finished, and Jake, trying to keep his stockinged feet away from the hissing coals, was feeling in the darkness for his boots.

In silence, bending against the long incline, they started up the two-hundred-foot slope, Mrs. Kubichek in the lead. In a moment the sound of the horse's steady munching was gone. The sound of trickling water faded, but still there was no square of light ahead of them. They climbed onward, occasionally catching at a mine timber to help themselves along, and after a while the damp warm air was replaced by air that was dry and cold.

At the surface Mrs. Kubichek stopped and stared about her. The snow was coming down more heavily now. The wind had become stronger. After putting out her lamp - chiefly to inconvenience Jake - she could not, for a moment, make out the path, nor even her earlier footsteps. In the darkness she could not see the bunkhouse near the mine entrance. It seemed to her that she was walled in.

Then across the valley she noticed headlights raising snow-drifted pillars against the dark sky. Bulldozers, their yellow bodies lost in the snow, were swarming over the new hills. Even while the wind swirled into a blizzard, while the snow came in torn, driven fragments, men were laboring, defying the night.

After she caught her breath Mrs. Kubichek spoke. "My boys," she said, hesitantly, preparing to try the new words on her dry lips, "- they do the blasting over there."

"Good," Jake said. "That's good money." He raised his hand in a faint gesture and started down the path.

"Jake," Mrs. Kubichek said.

"Sure."

"I'll bet you didn't eat," Rachel said. "I'l1 go get you some supper."

"I can eat in my cabin. I got some soup I made yesterday."

"How about some roast partridge and some wild cranberry sauce? You'd have time to go start your fire."

"My mash is spoiled, probably," Jake said.

"I got some sugar in the house. Left over from canning."

Jake shrugged. "Even then. I'll have to get a new container." He started again down the path.

"I got an eight-gallon cream can," Mrs. Kubichek called. "Come on over to the shack."

"You sure?" Jake said. "Eight gallons?"

"Come on," Mrs. Kubichek said. She waved her hands through the snowflakes as if to shoo them away. "I don't think you charge them enough, Jake."

"I haven't even got any empties," Jake said.

"There are all kinds out behind the bunkhouse. A regular little gold mine."

Jake cleared his throat but didn't speak. He reached up and tapped the straw hat more firmly onto his head.

"You need a light?" Mrs. Kubichek said.

"I think I can make out," Jake the Miner said.

Mrs. Kubichek chuckled deeply. "You think," she said. "You figure, Jake, we could soak them three-fifty for stuff that's been run through a loaf of bread?"

SAY AH

The mechanical voice has got to be kidding: Edmonton International Airport it says, in English, then in French: and down below our jet engines we see nothing but frozen wheatfields. The wheels rumble down Extinguish your cigarette Boucler les ceintures SVP Put the back of your seat in an upright position. The tails of 100 Shorthorn heifers are wind direction indicators. I say my usual prayer to the great god Tit.

The earth is firm. And then we unbuckle our seat belts and it's farewell to my favourite stewardess. I personally return her copies of _Time_ and _Life_. A stairway tilts me away from her foam rubber smile.

And it's only 38 degrees below zero outside. The wind rams the iron air down our throats. I shelter my nuts in my left hand, clutch my throat with my right. We run for it, hipperty hop, hey WHOOOeeee hold your jesus breath or you'll frostburn your lungs, allow for the wind chill factor - down under the silvery wing and the long dash for the Admin Building. It can't be more than a mile and a half. We string out 20 of us, 40, 60, businessmen holding their feathered hats and wagging their briefcases, long-legged birds tugging their miniskirts over their frost-tweaked asses. We gallop, then straggle out into a blown clothesline of flapping legs; the wind slams along parallel to the tarmac, driving the powdered ice into domed fur caps, into the root hairs of dyed rabbit and genuine mink, in at my frosted nostrils and my plugged ears, up between the legs of Alberta's finest matrons new back from Acapulco and knock knock at their sun-kissed pussies; we play crack-the-whip now, strung out and wavering, we are wild geese on a mother-loving Canadian sunset, the DC8 a mere glacier disappearing on the distant ...

I should have stayed home.

I had to come west.

***

Professor, I was innocent. I was totally innocent, a poor city boy set down among the wicked and the rebellious of the western frontier. But the next thing I know I'm in a cubicle with the world's most beautiful blonde and we're ordered to take our clothes off.

"There's been some mistake," I assure her.

She only smiles and nods.

"I'll straighten this out," I say. Ha.

She giggles.

I giggle.

"I won't rape you," I swear, trying to conceal what promises to be a hard-on or an icicle, I know not which: my peculiar anxieties of the recent past begin to fade: for a wild moment I have hope: the action has only commenced.

So help me God I was sober and sane, she took off her detective-style raincoat.

And her green cashmere sweater.

And her white peekaboo blouse.

And her old-fashioned patriotic plaid skirt, the Maple Leaf tartan yet, one of the bug-eyed authorities observed.

And then she takes off her tits.

You heard me, Professor. Her sculpted and aerodynamic _tits_. And then she takes off her goddamned yellow wig and her gold bracelet and her skirt-petticoat and her ghastly pink silk undies.

Maybe the cock and balls were fake too, I don't know. This is a peculiar land, Professor. Illusion is rife.

A pair of well-dressed customs officials have been hanging around all this time and one of them finally says to me, "What're you waiting for, sir?" He picks up that pair of gorgeous tits and sniffs them.

And he is all smiles.

I mean, all of a sudden you can smell the grass a mile away. I take a deep breath myself. The customs officer looks at the poor dumb bastard standing there in his earrings and his high heels and his limp prick. "Next time you're waiting in an airport," he says, "remember to use the _ladies_ ' room."

But the fun has only begun.

"Get your pants off," the same authority says to me.

And then he's waving the Queen's Own flashlight up my Royal American asshole. "See anything?" the other one asks him.

"What do you expect," I venture wittily, bent over, "tonsils?"

"Say aaah," this other naked kid says, pausing on his way to the crowbar hotel.

They found nothing. I had smoked my last joint before leaving home. "There are trips and there are trips," my wife said, checking through my suitcase. The bitch kept everything for herself. "I'll be the lonely one," she added.

But the next thing I knew I was being left alone. "Wait," a customs officer called back over his well-dressed shoulder.

And I waited.

And I waited.

I was stranger to this alien land. I was bare-assed as the day I was born, and slowly assuming the original purple hue. I was cast up on the shores of desolation, I was tossed out into the night of dark despair. Why, I asked myself, does man venture into the unknown when he could be safe in his two-room walk-up apartment with beer in his refrigerator, spaghetti on his menu, unread books piled high on his bricks and boards, nooky in his sagging bed?

I had to get to a telephone. If I got hold of the chairman of the English Department, University of Alberta, he'd see me through this moment of misfortune. And gratitude alone would make me teach bonehead English for the rest of my long life.

First I tried simply to flag down a passerby from the door of my cubicle, in order that I might ask a simple question.

But the middle-class bastards who run the world had turned out to be a pack of snivelling two-bit smugglers. Yes, Professor, ask a naked man if you want the naked truth. King Lear comes to mind. Thieves. The backbone of civilization. Quivering thieves. Those customs men in looking for marijuana, for Mary Jane, had hit on a regular bonanza. The hallway buzzed with catastrophe. One decent middle-aged God-fearing Alberta lady proved to be wearing three suits of new American clothing. Another had six sets of Mexican knives, forks and spoons arranged in neat geometric patterns inside her corset. A third was found to have secreted an expensive Swiss watch where, had it not accidentally slipped free, it might never have been discovered. Madam, I wanted to tell her, read Bergson on the duration of time.
I peeked from my doorway, listened to the gossip, beckoned to the occasional wanderer. I'm not an unattractive man. I'm tall. Only a slight beer gut for a promising graduate student of twenty-nine. Much of me covered in curly black hair, especially my head. Ha. One hand cupped like a very fig leaf over my private parts. I had visions of my suitcase somewhere in this vast building going around and around on a great millwheel where suitcases issue forth from some mechanical colon. I cried out to passing strangers. I winked at a little redhead who trotted by carrying her green shoes in her left hand, footsore and blind to my suffering. I called softly, "Help," to a stout dowager who was being led by a police dog on a leash. I whispered, "Up against the wall, mother," to a gal in big glasses who was lugging a portrait of Ché.

A new customs man came by my cubicle to insert a new and hippie victim, looked at me, said, "What in hell is going on in here?"

I attempted an explanation.

"What are you," the customs man inquired, "some kind of an _exhibitionist_ or something?"

I had inadvertently raised a hand in gesture while trying to emphasize a point. I wanted to get out of that goddamned place. I was hungry. I had a dissertation to complete.

"Please," I tried to explain. "A telephone -"

"We changed shift," the customs man said. His uniform was the exact black and white of the one his predecessors had worn, his face was pale and ready-made. He turned, leading his victim to another cubicle. "Wait," he called over his padded shoulder.

* * *

Who invented zero? The answer slips my mind.

* * *

"What's bothering you," she said, "somebody offer you a job?"

"Miracles," I said. "You keep asking for miracles." "Genius," she said, "nine years is long enough even for _you_ to be a graduate student; I'm sick of working six days a week in that fucking cheapskate Xerox Room to keep you in beer money."

* * *

Professor, I'm a man who watches for signs. The great god Tit is trying to tell me something.

There's this cowboy, see? I mean, back east in Binghamton, not here. Have you ever noticed? Not likely. Yes, _cowboy_ ; cowboy hat and cowboy chaps. And once each week, summer or winter, spring or fall, he appears out of nowhere, rides in a circle around Vestal U., and disappears. I swear to God.

I looked up from a medieval romance one morning, and there he was, pricking on the green grass. Shitting in one of the Vice-President's empty fountains. The horse, not the cowboy.

That man is my racial fucking memory. I saw him: The Vestal Cowpuncher, giving his ass a ride for the 333rd time. I saw that spectre and I knew the end...

* * *

What's the use? Why am I sitting here in a chartreuse easy chair in a long row of empty chairs in this empty terminal? You ought to see this place, this is where silence was invented. Every last person has disappeared. The only action is in the orange drink container. Promising eastern graduate student comes west and does not leave air terminal. Rides empty escalators up and walks down. Stares at Shadbolt painting of labyrinthine airport. Studies foreign languages: MEN HOMMES CABALLEROS.

SOMETHING FISHY IN THE POOL

After a while she knew the fish was more than a fish. Again it darted toward her, its pointed mouth opening in the still water. How it got into the swimming pool in the first place she couldn't imagine. She glanced up to see if the man in the window above the diving board was still there. But he was gone; she was alone.

Except for the fish. It darted abruptly, touched the instep of her raised foot. It turned, flashed between her thighs. She forced her legs together. But in that instant she first thought of taking off her swimsuit. The fish flicked past her, its tail caressing the backs of her knees.

The man who appeared on the diving board was wearing a purple bathrobe. He watched the fish, not the woman. Perhaps he was the man she'd seen in the window. He raised his right hand when he spoke: "Toronto is not the graveyard of Canada. May you all wake up one morning and find that you are in fact alive."

The woman in the pool took off her swimsuit top. It was her first visit to Toronto. The Writers' Union of Canada had never met in Toronto before. The fish moved past her, one gentle fin touching like the tongue of a lover across her midriff.

The man on the diving board spoke to the fish. "May the dugs of your women run with wine. Niagara Peninsula wine."

The speaker was not Pierre Berton. Pierre Berton has national dreams. The fish may have been a pike. But it was more than a fish. The speaker said: "May the faces of your grandmothers look like the covers of New Canadian Library paperbacks."

Hate is love in Toronto. The speaker loved his native city. "May every secretary in Toronto be sent to London for one week so as to be able, forever thereafter, to affect a British accent. May the ladies and gentlemen of Rosedale each have a picture of the Queen tattooed on that part of his or her anatomy that speaks most to the worship of royalty."

The fish at that instant touched its round and pointed mouth to the nipple of the swimmer's left breast. She started to brush it away and did not. She was from the Maritimes, and never in her life, except possibly once or twice, had a fish kissed the nipple of her left breast.

"May each of you," the man on the diving board said, "be unlucky enough to lend money to a Toronto publisher." He was not Jack McClelland. Jack McClelland does not write poetry. Only rarely does he publish poetry. Jack McClelland is from Toronto.

The fish sucked gently at the swimmer's hardening nipples, one, then the other, then the first again, moving suddenly, like a fish in an aquarium. The fish moving like a fish.

"May the University of Toronto be forced by law to become an integral part of the crumbling nation over whose decline it has so richly failed to preside. May every student in the city be compelled to look at a map of the hinterlands and discover where his father made his money and where his mother came from. May the subways beneath the streets become the sewer system, assuming they have not already done so."

The fish circled the motionless woman, circled close in, waiting.

Questions:

  * Do we detect here traces of Christian symbolism?

  * If not, why the immersion, why the fish?

  * Is Toronto the graveyard of Canada?

  * If so, why the immersion, why the fish?

  * Is the speaker possibly a prairie politician in disguise?

"May the stacks and bonds of every Toronto millionaire be declared worthless by virtue of boondoggling, skulduggery, embezzlement, the violation of widows and the breaking of all 10 commandments; and may each ex-millionaire then be buried up to his neck in a granary full of wheat and stored there at his own expense until the market improves." The speaker was not Joe Clark. Joe Clark is from Alberta. Joe Clark is a Progressive Conservative. "May every businessman in Toronto be compelled to spend one week of his annual vacation in the north extracting mercury from fish."

The swimmer was alone and the fish was alone. They were alone, together, in a Toronto hotel.

Except for the speaker. The man on the diving board was not Pierre Elliott Trudeau. A gentleman of the same name is Prime Minister of Greater Ontario. He is a poet. He is a great admirer of wheat farmers. "May the Eaton Centre be officially recognized as the Heaven of Toronto and may your credit cards grow wings and fly about one inch beyond your farthest reach and may you all, dancing desperately after your angelic credit cards, develop hernias and slipped discs and charley horses from your everlasting reaching into the pious air."

The woman in the swimming pool misunderstood entirely the speech, or poem, or sermon, or meditation. She, her own fingers gently alive now, caressing softly her own belly, slipped the bottom of her swimsuit down from the ridges of her perfect hipbones. She hesitated, teasing the fish.

The speaker was jealous.

The woman in the pool took off the bottom part of her swimsuit. The fish touched its mouth between her buttocks. It pushed and nuzzled close behind the swimmer. The speaker poised on the diving board cried out: "May the toilet of one apartment flush into the bathtub below and the bathtub drain into the washing machine of the apartment below that and the washing machine drain into the sink below that and the occupant of that nameless apartment take water from the sink to water her potted plants, and may spiders, aphids and slugs flourish on those shit-fed plants and crawl down into the cornflakes on the breakfast table in the apartment below that and the soggy cornflakes be fed to the cats and the cats vomit on the rugs of the apartment below that and the dogs in that apartment eat the vomit and shit themselves blind on the doormats of the well-guarded highrise and the dweller in the penthouse step in the shit and track it back to the top floor and clean his shoes over his toilet bowl, accidentally getting his middle finger into the dogshit, and flush his toilet."

Questions:

• Does the fecal nature of the story help us locate Toronto in the Great Body of the Universe?

• ?

The speaker was jealous of the fish. He said: "May each citizen of the city, at a given signal, ignoring the advice of the young Gargantua, instead of wiping with the neck of a goose, perform the same ceremony with the back of a lamprey eel."

Questions:

  * Is the speaker possibly an American doctor or industrialist come north for a spot of good fishing?

  * Is the average fish a bona fide Canadian citizen?

  * Is not the fish- i.e., considering for a moment the whale as a fish-sometimes identified not with the phallus but with the Terrible Mother?

One by one by one we answer. The question is always the same. And yet there is no answer. And the answer is always the same. The fish was a fish. The woman was a woman. The speaker from Toronto was man and bird.

He was a jealous lover. In Toronto hate is love. When the fish entered the woman was the woman dreaming? Or was the man dreaming the woman?

The man from Toronto was half man, half bird. He took off his bathrobe and left it on the diving board. He raised his wings. He flew heavily into the air, the motion of his flying smoothing the feathers between his legs. He made with his beak a kind of kissing sound.

When he dived into the pool the fish in the water disappeared. Where it went to the woman from the Maritimes never told.

THE MAN IN THE WINTER CATALOGUE

an anti-TV TV play for the Canadian imagination

"I only got stung in two horse deals in my life. One time trading off an old pinto mare I was tired of looking at. The second time trading to get her back."

\- overhead in a western beer parlour

Characters

  1. **Schmidt** : nearly a bum, but once handsome; a shabbily dressed 45'ish man who wants a winter catalogue.

  2. **Smythe:** in his late 60s, extremely well dressed, owner of a bookstore.

  3. **Sibyl:** Smythe's very young wife; beautiful in ladies' long winter underwear.

  4. **Policeman:** in hat, nightstick, gloves and long winter underwear.

  5. **Strolling Couple:** prosperous. Woman in fur coat.

Sets

  1. **Bookstore:** though the building was once, apparently, a courtroom.

  2. **Park:** Strangely reminiscent of the Parliament Grounds, Edmonton, but with a central statue of Queen Victoria seated.

3) **Museum Room:** containing among other things wax or pop art models of the main characters.

surreal, almost

nightmarish, maybe,

like tripping, eh?

a fable, perhaps.

but always Edmonton,

The Gateway to the North,

(insert symbols where appropriate)

ACT ONE, SCENE ONE

The bookstore is modishly decorated with instruments of torture/justice, such as handcuffs, thumbkins, bilboes, six-shooters, nooses, police badges, pictures of the rack and wheel. A door at the back. Main entrance to one side. A table covered with old books in the foreground. Smythe seated at what was once a judge's bench, going through a pile of secondhand books. His coat on a spike on the wall behind him. Telephone has a dial but no receiver. Schmidt enters.

SCHMIDT

Hey, fuckhead. _(Pause_ ) Hey, you up there on your high horse.

SMYTHE

Good evening.

SCHMIDT

I came for that winter catalogue.

SMYTHE

I'm sorry. This, is-we specialize in reference books only. ( _Closeup of a smile_ ) I have just now acquired - _Death Customs: An Analytical Study of Burial Rites_. ( _He_ _begins to fondle another book_ ) _Archaic Gravestones of Attica_. ...

_Meanwhile Schmidt goes to table and begins to search frantically_.

SMYTHE

Royal Sarcophagi of the XVIIIth Dynasty-

SCHMIDT

Catalogue. You heard me. The winter catalogue, mother.

SMYTHE

( _Studying the man as if he recognizes him_ ) I said, we do not handle catalogues, sir. Money will not buy a catalogue. Would you like, perhaps - _The Dictionary of Canadian Biography_? Nearly six hundred dead-

SCHMIDT

I need a winter catalogue, fall, 1945, no pages torn out, no kids cutting out pictures, no cigars and spectacles on the faces. Mint copy. Perfect. That's all. I'll pay any price. I'll give you - my whole rotten life.

SMYTHE

I am at this moment pressing a button, sir, that will bring a policeman on the run.

_Schmidt, unintimidated, goes from the table to the hook shelves_.

SMYTHE

( _Impressed_ ) Look, if you really want a catalogue that badly-

SCHMIDT

Just a couple of pages. One, even. Half - Listen, I was fresh out of the bloody goddamned army. Just back from the mud of Holland. I had nothing to do. I was - nowhere, nobody - and all of a sudden I was modelling underwear.

SMYTHE

For the winter catalogue!

SCHMIDT

You're with me, mate.

SMYTHE

( _Rushes pleading to Schmidt_ ) What was it like? Tell me. Quick. ( _He squirms in anticipation_ ) I've got to know. Now -

SCHMIDT

( _Becoming expansive, confident, struts about as if posing_ ) There's nothing to match it. Absolutely nothing.

Listen-in my whole life before and after-nothing, nothing. People touching, patting-try this, try that. The women going crazy. The hot lights. The cameras pointing. The boxes and boxes of brand new underwear-the endless new clean smell- And every stitch of your own clothes on a heap-gone. Just plain-every last uniform, suit, overcoat-just gone off-

_Smythe crosses his arms, clutching at the sleeves of his expensive black suit_.

SCHMIDT

But now I'm - I'm. ... They won't have me. I beg them. I plead. Every spring I go back east to Winnipeg, to Toronto, Montreal. I go from store to store-

SMYTHE

It was the chance of a lifetime!

SCHMIDT

Now all I ask is one picture from that catalogue. One lousy picture and everything-

SMYTHE

Never! You fool. Get out of here. You raving maniac. We have no catalogues here. I have not one page from one catalogue on these premises. None. I have burned, bought up, torn up, ripped, crumpled, destroyed, ravished every copy of every catalogue that ever came into my sight. They are all gone. Right down to the very last copy, the very last picture -

SCHMIDT

( _Breaks out in amused laughter_ ) I phoned before I took the trouble of coming down here at this awful hour. A lady said you have a winter catalogue, vintage 1945.

SMYTHE

That's a filthy lie.

SCHMIDT

Perfect condition, she said. No kids punching holes with their pencils. No beards on the ladies. No pricks and balls -

SMYTHE

No! Not here!

Smythe runs frantically to the shop's back door.

SMYTHE

Sibyl. Come Sibyl. Come.

SCHMIDT

Okay, I'll go. I'll stop by in the morning. Maybe you've mislaid it. Maybe you haven't priced it -

_Sibyl enters, wearing only ladies' long winter underwear_.

SIBYL

( _Disdainful_ ) You want me?

SMYTHE

( _Bursting out_ ) It was on page 234. Right in the very middle –

_Sibyl swings around as if showing off a gown_.

SCHMIDT

Lady, all I want is that catalogue you mentioned. You said you have a catalogue.

SIBYL

Perhaps I was teasing. Yes. I thought Smittie was listening again. I was teasing Smittie.

SMYTHE

Forgive me, Sibyl.

SIBYL

Sir, I was merely teasing-

SCHMIDT

You mean - you gave me hope. Dirty pool, lady. And I spent my last buck on a cab. ( _He begins to look through one more book_ ) But how could I buy it? I can't even rent a room tonight. What pain - if you had it. You know - I was sure you'd say, Here, have it, I am honoured. I recognize you now, you are the man in the middle section, the higher priced -

SIBYL

You are, you know. You are the man in the middle -

SMYTHE

( _Breaking in_ ) Ah ha! You've done it again. You've got hold of a catalogue again, you young slut!

SIBYL

Now, Smittie - your energy. You must remember to conserve energy.

SMYTHE

You don't know what gratitude is, you young \- I took you out of that damned suburb. I gave you everything. A mink coat. Ski clothes. Hudson's Bay blankets. I sit in this stinking little shop day in and day out, morning to night, so you can have your –

He strikes her.

POLICEMAN

( _Off_ ) Here, here, sir.

_The policeman appears wearing the hat of an Edmonton traffic cop, white gloves, belt and badge perhaps, long winter underwear - he brandishes a nightstick_.

SMYTHE

( _Shouting, pointing to Schmidt_ ) Throw this tramp out. He comes in here trying to steal books; trying to seduce my innocent wife. He hasn't a penny in his pockets -

SCHMIDT

All I ask is a reasonably quiet cell, no chicken, no tuna -

POLICEMAN

You try the sidewalk for size, loafer.

Schmidt tries once more to read book titles. The policeman jerks him away. Smythe goes on speaking.

SMYTHE

Let him starve on 97th Street with the pigeons. With the dirty old men. With the Indians and the whores and the poets and all those bastards who are too lazy to work. Is there no protection for virtuous citizens? What do you want from us? What do you want? -

ACT ONE, SCENE TWO

Park: light snow falling. A statue of Queen Victoria seated dominates; at each of four corners not a lion or the like but a small statue of a man in winter underwear, each in a pose taken from old Eaton's or Simpson's catalogues.

One couple passes along the sidewalk before the statue. The sound of the tires of a car that is stuck in snow. The same couple reappears and reappears during the entire scene, always from the same side of the set, but each time reflecting a different condition: drunkenness, estrangement, passion, haste, domestic boredom. And always they ignore Schmidt, do not acknowledge his existence.

_Schmidt stands between the statue and the sidewalk. The couple is passing_.

SCHMIDT

What am I offered? What do you make it? For the merest sum - it's all yours. Ribbed cuffs. For a token gesture. A bargain at any price; warm in the coldest weather. Consider, I beg you: rugged double stitching on all main seams to add long life.

_The couple disappears and Schmidt stands watching_.

SCHMIDT

And I was the perfect model. They said, your face is just troubled enough, handsome enough, young enough, old enough. For one whole season: I was perfect. ( _He laughs_ ) Joyful enough. Manly enough. Harmless enough.

_Couple reappears. Schmidt pulls off his cap and throws it on the sidewalk before them_.

SCHMIDT

Do you sleep in your shorts all winter? Or do you sleep in your fine old cozy combinations?

_The couple passes by. Schmidt pulls off one shoe and throws it on the sidewalk. He gradually peels off his clothing as his speech progresses: until he is left wearing nothing but long winter underwear. At times he addresses the passing couple, at times imagined couples_.

SCHMIDT

( _Offering his coat to an imagined couple_ ) Going, going. What do you make it? What am I offered? Just one faded picture; one old picture, the paper brittle. But all there! It must be all there - Going.

How add long life? you ask me. Extra soft and absorbent, yes; but tell us, how add long life? ... And the answer: Is the button panel strongly reinforced? And the real secret: Buy the correct size. Please state chest size on all orders: 36, 38, 42, 44 or 46 inches. Long sleeves unless stated. Double knit rib cuffs on long sleeve models. And always draught-fighting: ah, the wind in this nation. And how to resist the wind. Please, please state chest size. Double knit anklets at no extra cost. Extra soft; extra absorbent. ... But how add long life?

Flings off his last piece of clothing: stands in his underwear.

SCHMIDT

The double stitching may endure. But I have come apart.

_He climbs up and curls into a birth position on the statue's lap_.

SCHMIDT

And what can match genuine Australian wool for exceptional softness, for strength, for life-long shape retention _plus_ chill-fighting warmth? Heavyweight garment, rib knit for natural insulation. Cream in colour. Moth-proofed, of course. Wind-proofed, naturally. And please do remember to state your chest size: 36, 38, 40, 42 -

SMYTHE

Schmidt! ( _Distant, but coming closer_ ) Schmidt! Schmidt!

Schmidt!

_Schmidt covers his ears with his hands, closes his eyes tightly_.

SCHMIDT

Good God, what's that?

Smythe comes puffing up to the base of the statue.

SMYTHE

Hey, fuckhead! You up there. Come off your high horse. ( _Silence_ ) Schmidt! I have found you.

SCHMIDT

No. I am gone.

SMYTHE

Come here. Quickly. Come down.

SCHMIDT

It's too late. Come up if you must.

SMYTHE

It's not too late. Ah, Schmidt - ( _Pause_ ) I know where a catalogue is.

Silence. Sound of honky-tonk music, suggesting Edmonton's Klondike days; then a distant siren begins. Schmidt uncovers his ears, opens his eyes.

SCHMIDT

A catalogue?

SMYTHE

A catalogue. Definitely.

SCHMIDT

The year?

SMYTHE

1945.

SCHMIDT

Summer or winter?

SMYTHE

Winter. Fall of 45.

SCHMIDT

It's been hung in a backhouse.

SMYTHE

Only to read. A literary family.

SCHMIDT

No. It's too late now. Gone. Gone.

SMYTHE

It's time now. It's time.

SCHMIDT

You can't help me.

SMYTHE

I wouldn't if I could. Why do you think I searched - only you can save me.

SCHMIDT

All. ( _He stirs_ ) What a relief.

SMYTHE

Schmidt -as you may have guessed - my wife is in love with catalogues.

SCHMIDT

Preposterous. ( _He collapses again_ )

SMYTHE

She cannot love me. She cannot love men, islands, mountains, children, steak, wine, the sun - all she can love is those infernal pictures of men in catalogues, men in their long winter underwear.

SCHMIDT

( _Mischievously_ ) Leave her be.

SMYTHE

But I stole her sets of catalogues. On the day we married. To try and free her.

SCHMIDT

( _Jumping to a sitting position_ ) You burned them. Destroyed them. You goddamned maniac.

SMYTHE

No, Schmidt. Wait. I couldn't quite bring myself to do it. I burned and destroyed, yes. But when I came to the last set - I could not free - Oh, hell, I gave them to the museum. That way I can – occasionally - sneak over and take a look. It's not for me. It's simply to try and understand, I study them over and over and over and -

SCHMIDT

But then -

SMYTHE

I recognized you. I couldn't let on to Sibyl that you were - But I knew I'd seen you the moment I looked up from my newest copy of _Death Customs: An Analytical Study_. ... I looked and there you were. You, Schmidt. You. At first I couldn't make the connection. You were posed - here, like this ( _Going to the pedestal and modelling_ ) - your right foot on a bench, your, right hand at your neck, your left just at your belly -

SCHMIDT

Yes. Yes. That's it. You've seen me, Smythe. Then you've seen it. Then it did happen. I was certain it happened. Combinations. Pure wool. Reinforced and draught-resistant -

SMYTHE

Rugged double stitching -

SCHMIDT

on all main seams, yes -

Schmidt jumps down from the statue 's lap and the two men embrace, begin to dance wildly; the strolling couple passes by in a state of numb indifference: a married couple long dead to the outside world.

SMYTHE

To add long life!

SCHMIDT

( _Laughing_ ) At last, I'll have it. ( _Clutching imagined catalogue to himself_ )

SMYTHE

To hell with the bookstore. At last, I'm free of it. (Dancing by himself in the snow)

SCHMIDT

I've found it. I'll have it.

SMYTHE

It's gone, it's done, it's over -

SCHMIDT

At last. It's mine.

SMYTHE

I'm out of it. Free. Happy.

SCHMIDT

Show me, Smythe. Show me now, old buddy of mine. ...

_Smythe puts his arm around Schmidt and they leave. Snow falling. Siren fading. Honky-tonk music distant in background. Face of Queen Victoria. Fade_.

ACT TWO, SCENE ONE

Museum room: bookshelves contain rows of different kinds of catalogues, some open for display to popular items. Two screens along the back of the room, and on them a showing of Canadian commercial calendars. But the large square room is dominated by wax-figure or pop art models of the three main characters and the policeman.

Opening shot: a close-up of snow falling on a door: a brass plate on the door says: Royal Canadian Museum of Dreams.

Cut to Schmidt (in underwear) and Smythe inside the door, brushing off snow, looking about furtively.

Schmidt and Smythe do not speak. Furtively they go to a shelf; Smythe leads, takes down a catalogue. They are paging through it carefully, each holding half, looking for a particular picture, when suddenly the model of the policeman comes alive.

The two men leap apart, and in the process tear the catalogue in half; each runs with half the catalogue.

Policeman sinks into chair at a beer table with the models of Smythe and Schmidt. He begins to drink a glass of beer. When the glass touches his lips he is suddenly fixed, immobile.

Sounds of running now. And film clips: deserted Edmonton streets, deserted parks, night, snow falling: deserted hockey arena with the lights glaring bright on their own reflection in the ice: deserted bus stop. A bus stops. The door opens. No one gets out. No one gets on. Sound of a bus starting and going away.

ACT TWO, SCENE TWO

The bookstore again. Sibyl alone: now she is naked except for a Canadian flag which she wears draped carelessly about her torso. She is searching high and low for any hidden catalogues; and as she searches she recites with varying emphasis:

SIBYL

Strong, long-wearing flat-lock seams that won't chafe or irritate. Extra comfort because they're generously cut. Elastic drawers have taped fly front. Strong, long-wearing - ( _She flings down a book that for a moment deceived her into hoping_ ) Please. I've got to. His right hand at his neck. His right foot on a bench. The other - Those beautiful men in their underwear. Those beautiful footless men. Those footless men. But he had a foot. His right foot bare on a bench, his left - ( _She hears a noise outside. She rushes towards the door_ )

SIBYL

Smittie?

Schmidt steps in, dressed in Smythe's clothes. Calmly he walks into the room, puts his half of the catalogue on the desk, takes off his coat; calmly he hangs it on the spike behind the desk.

SCHMIDT

( _Slams down his fist on the half-catalogue_ ) He got the half with the underwear. I'll kill that bastard with my two bare hands.

SIBYL

( _Delighted by his attitude_ ) Smittie! Protect me from that evil man.

SCHMIDT

That rotten thief. He leads me to it - and then he skins out with my half.

SIBYL

( _Touching his arm_ ) Where have you been, Smittie? You mustn't leave me alone again. ( _She goes to the catalogue, and opens it; trembling she begins to turn the pages_ )

SCHMIDT

You can have that one, believe me. Keep it.

SIBYL

( _Surprised; instead of taking the catalogue, she puts her head on -his arm, strokes his arm_ ) I'm glad he escaped; I'm glad he's gone.

SCHMIDT*

( _Gently_ ) We could leave now ourselves. It's nearly dawn.

SIBYL

I waited at the door. All through the night -

SCHMIDT

Just for me - ( _His wonder growing_ ) You waited just - I ran through the streets. I shouted in the parks, the snow falling. ... At the entrance to bridges; the snow like a grille on the street lamps. ...

_____________________________________________________________________

*The serious-minded critic will by now have equated Schmidt with the Greek hero, Orpheus: that noble figure who ventured into the underworld to win back from death his wife. In that case Sibyl is not Sibyl but Eurydice. In that case she is married not to Smythe but to Schmidt. Author's Note.

SIBYL

Then it was you I heard, running.

SCHMIDT

The frost burning my eyes, the snow cutting my eyes. ... I ran and I ran and I looked in ... the empty restaurants ... empty churches ... empty store windows. ... And I had to say to you, _Now;_ _Now_ we can leave; _Now_ -

_Smythe in his underwear bursts in upon them: Sibyl and Schmidt leap apart guiltily: Smythe sees their response and laughs wickedly, wildly: he totters, threatening to collapse_.

SMYTHE

Tried to get rid of me, you two! Well! ( _Waving his half of the catalogue_ ) It's all mine now. I've got what you want, you two. And you'll pay. Oh how you'll pay, you pair of love bugs. To get one look. One glimpse of your precious pictures. You'll pay and beg and kneel and wheedle. Implore me now. Get down on your knees and begin to implore. ( _Neither of the two moves_ ) Get down on one knee. Both hands out. Towards me. Raise your arms -

SIBYL

Keep it, whoever you are. Keep your catalogue from me.

SCHMIDT

Now hang on, Sibyl, damnit the luck. Let's at least talk to the man.

SIBYL

Tell him to keep it. Tell him to burn it up.

SCHMIDT

Yeah. ... ( _Wavering_ ) Anyone in there we might recognize, sir? Just one picture, say -one picture of -

SMYTHE

You!

SCHMIDT

I didn't say that. That's not what I meant at all.

SMYTHE

Just come take one little peek and see what we might find here. ( _Opens the catalogue enticingly_ )

SCHMIDT

Never. I never want to see it. Destroy it. Burn it. Please, I beg you. Tear it to shreds.

SMYTHE

( _Wavering now_ ) You do have the other half? It's here, isn't it? You didn't harm it, did you? You fool, you didn't lose it?

SIBYL

( _Gently, taking up the half of the catalogue from the desk, even though Schmidt threatens for a moment to stop her_ ) We have it, yes. But we must keep it. It's priceless to us now. To both of us.

SMYTHE

You let me peek at yours - and I'll let you peek at mine. Fair trade.

SIBYL

Trade, nothing.

SMYTHE

I've got to see it. Please. I'll die without it. I've got to have it, you selfish bitch of a woman.

SIBYL

Why should I give you this? What have you to give me?

SMYTHE

I gave you everything, Sibyl. I gave you winter vacations in Hawaii. I gave - in the middle of winter, I took you to the sun. Remember? That January - our honeymoon -I was too busy this year, Sibyl. But we'll go. Right now –

Sibyl flings the half of the catalogue at Smythe. It falls to the floor and he falls after it, clutching it, hugging the two halves to his chest, sobbing.

SMYTHE

Now I have you, my darlings. You're mine. We're safe, we're safe. We're all together again. Don't worry, my darlings, don't cry. We're all together.

Schmidt looks away to the decorations on the walls and is silent, with grief or horror. Sibyl, slowly, goes to the desk, finds tape, glue and a scissors, takes them to Smythe. Smythe is a child now, babbling, playing in his underwear on the floor with the catalogue. He begins to cut out a picture of Schmidt modelling winter underwear. Schmidt goes to the wall, takes down from the spike the coat that was Smythe's, puts it on and strides towards the door.

SIBYL

Smittie?

SCHMIDT

( _Stopping in the doorway, his back to Smythe_ ) Come. It's nearly dawn, you know.

Sibyl hesitates. Smythe raises before her eyes the picture he has cut out of the catalogue.

SIBYL

Oh my God! Everything has changed.

SCHMIDT

( _In the doorway_ ) No. Nothing has changed. Nothing. (He turns)

Sibyl darts to Smythe, kneels behind him, cradles the drowsing man like a baby.

SIBYL ( _Singing_ )

Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree top,

When the wind blows,

the cradle will rock;

When the bough breaks,

the cradle will fall.

Down will come baby, cradle, and all.

Schmidt goes to desk. Then he remembers to hang up his coat. He sits down and begins with great concern to price the secondhand books.

STRIP POKER

Outline

A 60-minute TV drama

Robert Kroetsch

Place and Time: Redbolt Annual Bonspiel. Somewhere in southern Alberta or southern Saskatchewan: wheat country. Saturday night of a weekend event. Light snow falling.

CHARACTERS:

MARGE: Just past 35. Basically/once beautiful. Works too hard as a farmer's wife, looks older than she is. Slightly on the large and the heavy side; the basic voluptuousness of her body hidden by a siwash sweater that was discarded by her husband. Uptight, not by nature, but as a result of her marriage.

GLENN: Marge's husband. 42-43. Cock of the walk, on his way to a national curling championship in the near future. What they call on the prairies a gentleman farmer; i.e., a farmer who grows only grain, has nothing to do all winter but sleep, drink and curl. A tall, hefty man; unused energy and strength. Dressed to perfection as a curler. A well-barbered man.

DEBBIE: 25. Kind of cheap pretty. Turns out to be more serious than she looks. She's been helping in the refreshment booth, looks a little frazzled. Has no date. She's in between boyfriends, bored, looking for some action. At first pretends her fiancé has "gone up North"; later reveals he's left her.

RALPH: Either ageless or he never grew up. Blondish. Innocent face. Small, shy, gentle; plays the buffoon in order to survive in this macho world. Is in love with Marge, but Glenn won't take him seriously as a potential rival. He is the lead on the rink that Glenn skips.

BUCKSHOT: 28. Good-looking jock who is losing his form to beer. Wears a cowboy hat with his curling outfit. He is home for the bonspiel, his first visit in a few years. A hockey player who didn't make it; at first he pretends he's a success.

MINOR CHARACTERS: In pub scene

In curling scenes

SETTINGS: Pub in small town

Curling rink in same small town (four sheets of ice) house in same small town where Glenn and Marge live during the winter; especially the living room; preferably an old house redone to new.

SUMMARY OF ACTION:

ACT ONE: Five characters meet in pub during bonspiel. Tensions, desires, relationships that lead them to propose a game of strip poker. Glenn and Ralph leave to play a nine o'clock draw. Marge, Debbie and Buckshot go to Marge's house to prepare for the card game.

ACT TWO: Stripping of Buckshot, his failures as a potential hockey hero, in the context of Glenn's victories on the ice. Buckshot alone with the two women, admitting to his failures as the game of strip poker begins. Counterpoint of Glenn winning in the curling rink.

ACT THREE: Glenn and Ralph arrive at the house. Stripping of Debbie – her failed love life – by Glenn. Ralph and Buckshot at first participate, then withdraw into silent opposition to Glenn's assault. Glenn, frustrated, slowly switching the attack to his wife.

ACT FOUR: Marge begins to win by losing. She strips, literally, and in the process strips her husband. Marge released out of her years of repression, into glorious pleasure, into manic joy.

ACT FIVE: Glenn, in his burden of clothing, alone on one side of the table with all his winnings. The other four, reduced to various kinds of nakedness, dressing in each other's clothes, accepting each other, embracing each other, brought together by Marge's stripping.

ACT ONE:

  1. Fade-in: difficulty coming into focus. Debbie's hand holding a beer bottle. She is trying to run her thumbnail through the label from top to bottom while holding the bottle with one hand: i.e., playing the virgin game: if you can do it you are. Thumb doesn't make it.

DEBBIE

Oops!

  2. Marge's hand. Attempting the same thing. Painstaking, prolonged, desperate attempt. Doesn't make it. Picks up another bottle. Thumb goes all the way through the label.

DEBBIE

Hey, Marge. You're a virgin.

  3. Camera up to Marge's face. She is tired, concentrating, not quite amused. Yet almost pleased, looking at the bottle.

  4. Her husband's hand comes into the frame, takes the bottle out of her hand.

  5. Beer table. Buffalo head or mural on wall behind the table. Two men side replaying a curling game with beer bottles. Empty chair. Two women bored, not listening.

DEBBIE (poking Glenn)

Hey, Skip. Marge is a virgin. The husband is always the last to know.

GLENN (to Ralph)

See. Like this. If you'd had a little more weight on it.

He uses Marge's bottle to bang another bottle out of the imagined circle.

DEBBIE

Are we going to listen to this all night?

MARGE (examining the palms of her hands)

Glenn has another draw at nine. Haven't you, Glenn?

GLENN (glancing up suddenly)

What time is it?

DEBBIE (offering Glenn a beer bottle)

Come on, Glenn. I'll bet you can do it.

  6. Buckshot's back passes between table and camera. He is wearing an athlete's jacket, with crossed Canadian and American flags on the arm. On his back: Murphy's Hardware.

GLENN

Buckshot, you young bugger. Long time no see.

BUCKSHOT (apparently embarrassed)

Good to be back.

He shakes hands with Glenn. Then with Ralph. Looks at the empty chair and sees there's a box on it. Then acknowledges the two women.

DEBBIE

Hey. Thought you were down east. Playing for the Leafs or something.

RALPH

I've been watching the papers.

MARGE

You're grandmother told me.

GLENN (louder than the others)

How the hell long's it been, Buckshot?

  7. Buckshot's hands. He is either shaky or nervous. Buffalo head or mural out of focus in the background. Buckshot is counting fingers.

BUCKSHOT

Let me think ... must be three years ... four years ... When d'you get married?

  8. Glenn moving bottles again, arranging bottles.

GLENN (profoundly)

Time sure as hell does fly.

DEBBIE (to Buckshot)

Looks like you need some hair of the dog.

BUCKSHOT

Got to stay on the wagon. (Finds room for another chair at the table.) Getting beat twice in one day wasn't enough. (Flopping down in chair.) Got to play poker all night over at Tarnowski's.

  9. Debbie sets her glass of beer in front of Buckshot.

DEBBIE

Good for what ails you.

  10. Buckshot scratches the back of his head, tips the cowboy hat down over his eyes, tilts his chair back.

BUCKSHOT (to Glenn)

See you guys are still in it.

  11. Table shot. Two women waiting, listening now.

GLENN (nodding)

Going to win us that prize pig.

RALPH (shyly, to Marge)

Hope you didn't lose your recipe for ham and escalloped potatoes.

BUCKSHOT (to Glenn)

You working hard these days?

GLENN

Hardly working. (he pauses, drinks.) Between the grasshoppers and the Liberals, a 40-bushel crop is hardly worth taking off. Made just enough payments so I can borrow some more –

BUCKSHOT (picking up the beer)

First one since the last one. (he takes a sip, nods to Ralph.) Don't suppose you went and got married.

  12. Ralph, at the question, looks into his empty glass. Glenn stands up.

RALPH

Like the guys says. Takes two to tango –

GLENN

Come on, lead. Get your ass in gear.

MARGE (picking up the box from the empty chair)

Take these pies to the refreshment booth, will you, dear?

  13. Glenn's face, for an instant, stiff.

MARGE

Glenn?

GLENN

Aren't you coming? Take a look at us winners?

MARGE

Thought I'd stay here. Keep an eye on these two. (Indicating Debbie and Buckshot, trying to smile.)

GLENN

Ain't you supposed to work?

DEBBIE

I sweat enough for both of us today.

BUCKSHOT

What kind of pies, Marge? Not your lemon meringue –

MARGE

Three of them. (Checking herself; then, modestly.) Not like those I made for your sister's wedding –

BUCKSHOT

I'll buy them myself. Right here. Don't deliver them, Glenn. (He raises his hands to stop the show. He fumbles as if to find his wallet.)

MARGE

(She starts to speak, and doesn't. For the first time, she smiles.)

  14. Glenn's face. Giving orders.

You deliver your own pies. I'll ride with Ralph. (Then, to Buckshot.) Where's this poker game taking place?

  15. Buckshot's face. He looks at the two women. Gives them a big grin.

BUCKSHOT

What poker game?

GLENN

Come on. Bigtime hockey player. You must have money to burn.

BUCKSHOT

We thought we'd play at your house, Glenn.

After we eat these pies.

  16. Glenn, from behind Buckshot's chair, tumbles the cowboy hat over Buckshot's face. Buckshot slaps the hat out of the way, swings around on his chair.

DEBBIE

Hey, what is this, you two. Strip poker?

BUCKSHOT (speaking to Debbie; but really making a peace overture to Glenn)

What d'you know about strip poker?

DEBBIE

Well. Only time I played – I lost my shirt. (She giggles.)

GLENN (winking at Buckshot)

Give you a chance to get back what you lost. (He and Ralph move away, prepared to leave.) What d'you say we make it a date?

BUCKSHOT

Okay by me.

DEBBIE

I'll see you.

RALPH

(Shrugs, hesitantly.)

MARGE (she pulls the siwash sweater close around her breasts)

No way.

GLENN (leaving)

We'll be there by midnight.

  17. Bottles arranged in curling formation on table begin to dissolve into curling rocks.

GLENN (from a distance)

You girls go home and turn up the furnace. You're going to get cold.

  18. Curling rink. NFB might have some shots of cars parked outside a small town rink in winter, snow falling. If not: directly to Glenn and Ralph entering, stopping to knock the snow off their shoulders, rubbing their hands. It's below zero outside. They walk past the posted draws, past the prizes (including a picture of a pig), past the refreshment booth, past the spectators.

If this will work: on sound track, the bar sounds (a glass breaking, someone shouting, singing, etc.) instead of curling sounds.

While Glenn and Ralph enter onto the ice, begin the process of washing their boots and cleaning their rocks, pick up the conversation in the pub:

BUCKSHOT

You and that Kraus boy – Heard you were practically engaged.

DEBBIE

(Pause) He's got to make some money first.

BUCKSHOT

Still working for the Pool?

DEBBIE

Gone up North. The oil rigs. Good money. (Pause) I miss him.

BUCKSHOT

I'll bet you miss him.

DEBBIE

That's right. I miss him. Even if he isn't a hockey star.

BUCKSHOT

(Doesn't speak)

MARGE

Shouldn't do it.

BUCKSHOT

Huh? Oh –

DEBBIE

We got to, Marge. Got to have a little fun –

BUCKSHOT

Don't worry. I'm a lousy player. (Laughs)

I promise to lose ... If you do.

DEBBIE

I'm not exactly a winner.

MARGE

Jesus, I'm so scared I'm shaking.

  19. Dissolve from curling rink to pub. Din of pub rises. Buckshot is at the bar, buying a dozen beer. He turns away, lifting the case of beer off the counter as he does so. Debbie stands up. Marge remains seated.

MARGE

I sould go watch Glenn.

DEBBIE

That sounds like a barrel of fun.

  20. Marge picks up the bottle with the torn label. Tears off the rest of the label.

FADE-OUT

ACT TWO

  1. Spectators' window in curling rink: old men killing time, women who run the refreshment booth, some of their older children – all watching the game in stoic silence. Glenn is completely absorbed, watching the rocks slide into the circles at his feet. Ralph, broom in hand, scanning the faces in the window, is trying to catch a glimpse of Marge. Marge is not there.

  2. Cut to Debbie, looking up the stairway in the living room of Marge's house.

DEBBIE

Hey. What happened up there? You fall in?

  3. Buckshot comes down the stairs wearing a cap instead of his cowboy hat, a Hawaiian shirt over his jacket: both the cap and the shirt, obviously, belong to Glenn. Cap of the kind worn by snowmobilers. Above the long brim is an advertisement: Power King.

Debbie begins to laugh.

MARGE (looks in from the kitchen)

You didn't wake the baby-sitter!

BUCKSHOT

How old is she?

MARGE

She's Glenn's mother. Try if you like.

  4. Buckshot flexes his muscles, struts around, singing.

BUCKSHOT

Be kind to your web-footed friends,

For a duck may be somebody's mother –

  5. Marge in doorway, pie in one hand, knife in the other. Against her will, begins to laugh.

MARGE

Don't Buckshot –

  6. Buckshot looking fierce.

BUCKSHOT

Where're we going to fight this sudden-death, winter-takes-all, belly-to-belly battle to the last stitch?

  7. Debbie, not laughing, watching Buckshot with a mixture of desire and distrust.

DEBBIE

Upstairs.

MARGE

Right here in the living room. With all the lights on. (She pauses.) No. With them off. (She pauses.) No. With them on –

  8. Together they pick up the dining room table, carry it into the living room past the TV set. Doilies on the furniture. Fake animals on the floor. T. Eaton's bucolic scenes on the walls.

  9. Cap on Buckshot's head intrudes itself into the frame: Power King. Dissolve to curling rink.

Curling rink scene:

Cut to Glenn. As Skip, he is looking down the ice, asking for a rock. The rock comes down the ice: behind it the spectators' window. More people watching now.

Glenn, to Ralph, as the rock begins to move:

GLENN

Like to see that Debbie in her birthday suit. We got to win this one fast.

Rock coming down the ice.

GLENN

Sweep!

Ralph and another man, sweeping furiously.

GLENN

Sweep! Sweep! Sweep!

Three men together over the moving rock, two sweeping, Glenn bent down as if to force the rock to obey him by his presence. Dissolving to next scene

Card playing scene:

Three people at the table: Marge, Debbie, Buckshot.

Buckshot, by cheating, makes Marge win the first hand.

He wants to take off his pants: Marge won't let him. Marge looks him over, suggests he take off a shoe lace.

Debbie, more quietly sexual now, taking off an earring.

Buckshot, alone with the two women, no men present, can talk honestly. As he deals, he begins to confess: he isn't a hockey player at all. He didn't make it. He plays out the hand. Marge wins again. Debbie starts to take off her other earring, then reaches down, takes off a shoe instead. Buckshot takes off Glenn's Hawaiian shirt, throws it on the chesterfield instead of passing it to Marge.

Cut from shirt to curling rink.

Curling rink scene:

Glenn himself is curling now, bending in the hack; crowd watching. He makes the play, follows the rock: silence: silence: beautiful play: his rock hits: rocks explode outward:

Voices explode. Glenn here is master; confident, accomplished, being deferred to. Admired by the other men. Hugs Ralph, picks him up in a hug. Glenn's face at the moment of winning, almost sexual in its pleasure.

Cut to next scene, to Buckshot's face.

Card playing scene:

Buckshot, opening another beer, by hooking the cap of one bottle under the cap on another. Marge finds him an opener.

The game is quiet, intimate, warm. Three players who trust each other for the moment, using the game to communicate.

Disarray of objects: shoes, clothing, belts. Marge is flushed with the excitement of her winning still another hand. Buckshot takes off a sock, raises his bare foot onto the table, makes a joke about being a hockey player, a jock.

Debbie reaches under her sweater to unhook her brassiere, to take it off without taking off her sweater. She starts to talk about herself:

DEBBIE

First time I've had to unhook my own brassiere with a man around.

She jokes bitterly about her men. Can't get the brassiere. Buckshot offers to help. Apologizes as he does so, mentions the Kraus boy again.

DEBBIE

Oh, God, I was lying. He's gone. ... I don't know where he's gone. Walked in on me one night when I was in the sack with – I don't know. With somebody who didn't matter.

Marge, surprised but not quite shocked. Envious, perhaps. Wanting to talk –

MARGE

What does it mean, to be faithful?

BUCKSHOT

What does it matter? Besides a lot.

DEBBIE (dealing)

Loneliness forgives everything. Even love affairs.

MARGE

I never had a love affair. I got married instead.

DEBBIE

We all have old lovers.

BUCKSHOT

Not me.

DEBBIE

You. Marge. Me. All of us. Compelled by love –

BUCKSHOT (gently)

What the hell does that mean, Debbie?

Sounds in the kitchen; Glenn and Ralph are entering.

MARGE

Damn. Here they are.

Fade-out through cards in Marge's hand: a pair of queens and three jacks.

ACT THREE

Scene: Glenn's deal

Glenn, followed by Ralph carrying two bottles of beer, intrudes on the game. Debbie and Buckshot in disarray. Marge surrounded by her winnings. Glenn notices that Buckshot is wearing his cap.

BUCKSHOT

Take off your clothes and stay a while.

Glenn, in the flush of victory, can talk only of himself, of the game. "We whipped them. Beat them hollow. Could've skunked them if I'd had a sober lead." He walks around the table, paying special attention to Debbie, while the three players sit stock still. He begins to give them the details, begins to tell them what they missed. He is telling of his final play: the rocks explode again, in double exposure, over the walking man.

DEBBIE

Are we going to listen to this all night?

The rocks stop dead. Glenn's face: frozen for an instant.

GLENN

What would you like to do tonight? Honey.

DEBBIE

I was having a good time.

GLENN

I hear you've had lots of good times.

DEBBIE

That's my business.

GLENN

I guess so. (Glenn, pulling a chair to the table, signaling Ralph to do the same.) Maybe it's my turn to deal. Everybody gets his turn.

Confusion as they make room for five players at the table. Glenn picks up the deck. Calls for highest and lowest wild and begins to deal without explaining. The women are further confused. But Ralph and Buckshot understand: Glenn closing the male ranks.

Glenn wins the hand. Marge takes off her wristwatch. Buckshot takes off an earring that he's been wearing.

GLENN (protesting)

What's the house rule here?

BUCKSHOT

You can take off anything you can put on.

Ralph takes off his heavy sweater. Debbie starts to take off one of the socks (Buckshot's) she's wearing.

GLENN

What's the matter? Why not your sweater too?

Buckshot and Ralph join in briefly. But Glenn becomes more explicitly sexual, more nearly vicious.

Marge breaks in and tells Ralph to deal.

Scene: Ralph's deal

Before Ralph can speak, Glenn calls for kings and little ones wild. Both Ralph and Buckshot fall silent. The hand is played quickly. Glenn wins again.

Marge takes out a hairpin, though the others protest. Ralph takes off a shoe.

Debbie starts to take off the second sock. Glenn, crudely, protests. Buckshot speaks up to defend her.

GLENN

You Kraus's successor? Hear he caught her in – Well. You know. Or don't you –

Buckshot falls silent again. He tries to argue again. Then it is his turn to give up something: he takes off Glenn's hat and returns it. Glenn puts it on. Pushes the cards over to Debbie.

Marge goes over to the radio, turns on the Moose Jaw station: fast talk and contemporary music. Low in background.

Scene: Debbie's deal.

Debbie is almost crying. She can't speak. Glenn, pressing his victory, says they will play with deuces, hooks and one-eyed jacks wild. Debbie, meekly nods, meekly deals.

We see their hands. Marge has her husband beat.

Glenn thinks he has the winning hand. He speaks with mock gentleness to Debbie. He coaxes her now, encourages her, flirts with her.

Glenn is first to lay down his hand. A strong hand.

Ralph folds his cards. Under the table, he takes off his pants.

Debbie folds her cards. She takes off nothing. She does nothing. Glenn waits for a moment, then glances at his wife.

We see Marge's hand again. She hesitates. She realizes she has Glenn beat. She folds her cards and places them face-down on the deck. She slips off her wedding band and pushes it across the table to Glenn.

FADE-OUT

ACT FOUR

Marge dealing, suddenly alive.

MARGE

This is going to be stud poker, baby. Just plain stud.

Marge stands up to deal, slapping the cards into place in front of each player. She deals one card down to each, then four more cards to each, face up. She turns up her own card, reaches and turns up Glenn's.

MARGE

You're a big winner, Glenn. Even in stud you can't lose.

She undoes her skirt, steps out of it, flings it across the table at Glenn.

This is her scene. She begins to play recklessly, talk recklessly, act recklessly. Glenn, embarrassed, tries to talk about curling. About the fact that he's being touted to win the provincial championship. Confusion of thoughts in Marge's mind: trophies, curling, undressing.

MARGE

You went to Hawaii to see the strippers. Sure as hell didn't do any surfing courtesy of Wester Grain Grower. Came back with some dirty pictures for the boys.

GLENN (pompously, to the others)

We had a little meeting in Hawaii. Couldn't take Marge and she'll never forgive me. Business. New markets – Get them Japanese –

MARGE

Tell them, Glenn. Tell them what it's like to be a bigshot grain farmer. Too busy to babysit for your wife one afternoon. Too busy to talk to your kids. Too busy to visit your mother, even when she comes over here to help when you can't. Too busy to do a real day's work in five-months of this goddamned winter.

GLENN (softly, condescendingly)

Why don't you sit down, Marge? Just shut up and sit down.

MARGE

Why don't you shut up and sit down? Why don't you shut and sit down? (She begins to sing, begins to dance.)

Why don't we all shut up and sit down?

The others play cards feverishly, exchanging items, confusing the game: trying to ignore Marge and Glenn.

RALPH

You just lost again, Marge.

MARGE (sitting down at the table)

Right. I just lost again.

Marge, under the table, taking off her panties.

Scene two: Marge's deal again

MARGE

These are the wild cards: deuces, treys, one-eyed jacks, fours, queens and the king with the axe.

GLENN

What the hell does that mean?

MARGE

Damned if I know.

GLENN

Let's just show a little self-respect.

MARGE

We must have self-respect. Ladies and gentlemen, we must have self-respect. Screw everybody else. But we must have self-respect.

She throws off a shirt that Glenn has draped over her shoulders. He can't stand her losing, her nakedness shared with others; he is becoming jealous. She begins to win by losing.

MARGE (placing the shirt on Glenn's shoulders)

Tell Debbie what a terror you are in bed. What an accomplished lover. Take off your clothes, Glenn. Show her. Show her what a he-man really is.

DEBBIE (discreetly)

I got to go – (standing up) sharpen my skates.

Debbie going up the stairs. Glenn watching.

Scene three: Marge, forced by the others, to take her turn dealing

MARGE

This is low hole. Honey.

GLENN (to Buckshot)

I suppose you taught her this stuff.

MARGE

Two down. Four up. One down. The lowest card facing down is wild. Here goes –

Starts to deal all over the table.

GLENN

Ralph. She'll listen to you. Make her act civilized.

RALPH (weakly)

She's doing all right. She's – that's – (admiration) okay.

GLENN

I keep you alive, Ralph. You couldn't get a job in this town – if you weren't my buddy. (Glenn, at a loss, turning to Buckshot)

Buckshot, she's all hot for you. I'm not blind. I can see what's going on behind my back. Do something –

Buckshot, opening more beer.

Glenn stands up, moves across the room, bull-like. Faces Marge. She is naked, stripped down, dancing, awkwardly gyrating; dead-on shot as she approaches him, enticing, mocking, her big, worn body attractive to him; bare skin double-exposed with broom sweeping; her pubic hair to rocks hitting and bursting apart; the rhythm of her body, the texture of her skin double-exposed with newly sprayed ice; she is mocking him, mocking his prurience and his prudery, even while her body says I did love you, could love you, could fuck you; you dumb sonofabitch, look, look:

Glenn backs away. Glenn turns, knocks the radio off station.

Silence.

He can't look at Marge.

GLENN

Make some lunch for our guests. Some coffee. Ain't we got no manners at all in this house.

Marge dancing: freeze shot.

ACT FIVE

DEBBIE

I'll do it. She comes down the stairway, wearing little other than Buckshot's cowboy hat, which she's found in the bathroom. Glenn is fully clothed in his curling outfit. The others are down to minimums.

GLENN

Huh? ... What'll you do, sweetheart?

DEBBIE

I'll do it. I'll serve the pie. God ahead and play, Marge. Have a little fun once in your life.

BUCKSHOT (to Debbie)

I'll give you a hand.

RALPH

Here, let me do something.

GLENN

Wait a minute, gang. Somebody's got to play with me.

He sits surrounded by half their clothing. Facing his naked wife. Glenn tries to deal. No one responding but Marge. Glenn deals two hands, trying all the while not to notice her sweating skin, her full breasts.

BUCKSHOT (to Debbie)

You going to wear my hat, Debbie, I'm going to wear your bazooms.

Buckshot takes Debbie's brassiere from Glenn's winnings, tries to put it on. Picks up Buckshot's boots.

Laughing, shoving, Buckshot and Debbie struggle into each other's clothing.

GLENN (shouting)

I want a roast beef sandwich. Dill pickles. Sweet pickles. Some sliced ham. Coffee. What's for dessert?

Ralph, watching, of a sudden puts on an item of Marge's clothing, turns to Marge:

RALPH

What would you like me to serve for supper?

Marge, before answering, reaches for an item of clothing. Instead of taking something of her own or her husband's, she takes Ralph's sweater.

MARGE

The dill pickles are in the cellar.

Marge and Ralph, putting on each other's clothing, continue to talk.

RALPH

Should I use the good china?

MARGE

Yes, dear. Please do.

Buckshot, dressed as Debbie, comes into the room with a case of beer; he puts it on the table where Glenn is trying to deal. Debbie follows him, loaded down with pies, plates and forks.

BUCKSHOT

Love. Will you have Calgary or Both?

DEBBIE

Both, love. Let's get the cut-glass tumblers.

RALPH (to Marge)

And what else will you have?

MARGE

Just this, dearest – (she kisses Ralph's cheek)

GLENN

Now wait a minute.

DEBBIE (to Buckshot)

Crack us a couple more beers, lover.

Debbie sets pie and beer in front of Glenn.

Marge and Ralph, each holding a beer, a piece of lemon meringue pie, kiss each other on the mouth.

DEBBIE (to Glenn)

Chow time.

Glenn, alone at the table, fully clothed. Marge and Ralph side by side on the chesterfield; Ralph, apparently drunk but possibly very sober, offers his first forkful of pie to Marge.

Debbie sits down in easy chair; Buckshot sits on her lap. Both trying to hold beer and pie, spilling both, laughing, touching each other.

Clothing, beer, dishes, pie, cards scattered and heaped on table around Glenn. Glenn, his cap on crooked now, leans forward, takes a bite of pie, a drink of beer.

Putting down his beer bottle he notices other bottles. He begins to arrange them as if to explain a play. Glimpse of Marge's ring on the table, surrounded by the bottles.

GLENN

Too hot in here. (To Marge) You been fiddling with that thermostat again?

RALPH

Humming. (He is humming the tune of

She gave me wine

And whiskey too;

And then she showed me

Her ring-dang-doo.)

MARGE (ambiguously to Ralph and Glenn)

Take off your clothes and stay a while.

FADE-OUT on curling rock sliding down bare sheet of ice that looks endless. No rocks visible. But the sound of rocks hitting.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

**Robert Kroetsch** is Canada's major postmodern writer. He was a man of divided loyalties: a prose writer, a poet, an essayist, a critic, a university professor. With this anthology, he is recognized as a short story writer, which was not a very well known fact throughout his writing career.

Born in 1927 in Heisler, Alberta, he remained in the prairies throughout his youth, as is evident from the settings of any of his novels. He attended the University of Alberta and received his B.A. in 1948. From there, he worked at various jobs in the Canadian North and Labrador. He attended McGill for a year in 1954 to study under Hugh MacLennan, and then completed his M.A. at Middlebury College in Vermont. He earned a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Iowa in 1961. He remained in the States teaching at State University of New York, Binghamton, until 1978 when he accepted a teaching position at the University of Manitoba. In the States, he co-founded _Boundary 2_ : an international journal of postmodern literature in 1972.

His first novel in 1965, _But We Are Exiles_ , was followed by his _Out West_ triptych, _Words of My Roaring_ (1966), _The Studhorse Man_ (1969) and _Gone Indian_ (1973). He won a Governor General's Award for _The Studhorse Man_ in 1969. His later novels include: _Badlands_ (1975), _What the Crow Said_ (1978), _Alibi_ (1983), _The Puppeteer_ (1992), _The Man From the Creeks_ (1998). His texts resist one single reading and interpretation, seriously challenging traditional literary practices. All of his novels take place in Canada, particularly in the prairies.

Kroetsch was also an accomplished poet and literary critic. _Completed Field Notes_ (1989) is a collection made up of excerpts from his famous long poems, such as "The Seed Catalogue," and _The Lovely Treachery of Words_ (1989) is a collection of his critical essays. Both his poetry and critical writings are postmodern subverting tradition; they are fragmented and open ended.

In 2004 Robert Kroetsch was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.

 _Defy the Night_ was first published in _The University of Kansas City Review_ in 1960, and then under the title _Earth Moving_ in Rudy Wiebe's short story collection _Stories From Western Canada_ in 1972.
 The text is reprinted according to the unpublished manuscript found in the University of Calgary Special Collections Library.

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