Bone Coulee by Larry Warwaruk Page A

question:

    “…the ruling is that I am not allowed to
    call the witnesses…?”

    A clerk of the court announces:

    “Mac Chorniak, do you swear to…do you
    swear…do you swear…do you swear to
    tell…?”

    Mac bolts from his chair. The sun blinds him. He covers his eyes and wipes his wet brow. He looks at his watch. Eleven thirty and Esther doesn’t expect him until after lunch. He won’t bother to eat anything; the way he’s shaking he could swear that he’s Abner’s twin brother. Mac’s got to get out of the house.
    He drives around town like a policeman on patrol, making sure that everything’s in order, everything in place like it’s always been. Of course it’s not the same as it has always been, but the changes have been gradual. Decay never happens all at once. Things just get ripe until they’re at their best. It’s the final stages you don’t want.
    Rigley Motors is no longer much of anything. Sid sold gasoline until the tanks started leaking; it would cost a fortune to dig them up and haul away the contaminated dirt, and it took Sid all the legal wrangling he could fabricate in his capacity as mayor to keep the environmental watchdogs at bay.
    Both Ford and John Deere pulled out years ago, when the dealerships were centralized in Bad Hills. In 1928 Sid’s grandfather sold more cars than any other Ford dealership in the province. Mac’s father bought the last new car sold in Duncan, from Sid’s father, a 1954 blue-and-white Fairlane. Now the windows on the building are boarded up. The glass on the gas pumps is broken, the price on one of the pumps still showing $1.13 per gallon. Sid was smart to get his father to buy land for him in 1954 and have Mac farm it for him.
    At what used to be the main intersection, three buildings are no longer there: Pearson’s Hardware, the Toronto-Dominion Bank and the CNR station. On a Saturday night people gathered at this intersection like iron filings on a magnet. There has been one improvement. Fifty years ago the town hauled in clay to put a proper bed under the street running north from the bank.
    It looks like the grass needs cutting again at the fairgrounds. They’ve had too much rain; just like it was back in the fifties, when how many ball games got rained out? And the Casey Shows truck got stuck in the street. And the Indian camp was off just east of the grounds in those poplar trees….
    He drives from the fairgrounds up the street towards the empty lot where the CNR station once stood. He parks the truck alongside the election posters. And he takes out a pen to write on the back of an envelope. His imagination wanders. Mac’s content to muse with what he considers his own private, self-indulgent foolishness. How would Taras Shevchenko have seen Duncan? Mac writes on the envelope:

    Saturday night
    A swarm and sprawl, voices chatter
    Fried onion smell of Chinese Denver
    Car exhaust, train engine cinders
    Evening In Paris perfume
    Boys throwing crabapples
    That came by train back then
    Years pass on years
    Crabapple tree in senior’s yard
    Heavy with fruit that no one picks
    Maple trees in senior’s yard near death
    Sap drips on truck windshield
    Cobwebs
    Wind, dead leaves fall

    He sets the envelope on the dash and resumes his patrol. Every street. Up one, down another, his eyes on the windows of houses; some with drapes drawn, some not, some empty like a blind man’s eyes.
    When he drives up Esther’s street, she’s standing on the sidewalk waiting for him. He pulls up to the curb and reaches over the seat to open the passenger door. Esther lifts one leg up, but that’s as far as she gets.
    “Grab the handle, just above the door there,” Mac says. “And here. Give me your other hand and I’ll pull.”
    It’s not a common thing for a man and woman their ages to be driving out of town together, unless they have romantic interests. In every day and age it happens all the time. But that’s just not so with Mac and Esther. It may have