Bone Coulee by Larry Warwaruk Page B

entered their minds fifty years ago, but who doesn’t fantasize now and then.
    “Jen tells me that you took Abner out to look for a place to put the monument. You know, Mac, I haven’t been out there since Bill died. That’s ten years this coming December.”
    Esther doesn’t stop talking the whole drive out to Bone Coulee. “Everything’s gone. Schoolhouse. Our old yard plowed under. I see at least you haven’t plowed up the Chorniak homestead.”
    “Now that would be silly. But what do you think? The marker up here at the top, or back at the grid road where there’s more traffic?”
    “You can still see the trail marks here,” Esther says. “It would make more sense right here. And the view from here…down into the coulee….”
    “It’s what I thought.”
    “We should have waited lunch and had a picnic,” Esther says. “Remember our Sunday picnics down there in the trees?”
    “Should we drive down? I’d like to show you some things the archaeologist from the university pointed out to me when he was out last summer.”
    Esther pats Mac lightly on his knee. “Maybe another day. I’ll pack a lunch, and we’ll bring Jen and Abner with us.”
    “The archaeologist explained about the bones. How a grazing herd of buffalo could smell like a stockyard. Can’t you just imagine a herd tumbling down, breaking their legs, their necks?”
    “Gory, I’d say. I wouldn’t even watch Bill butcher a pig.”
    “Yeah, gory.”
    Esther takes the envelope from the top of the dashboard. “Saturday night,” she reads out loud, and a smile breaks out on her face. “So you write poetry.”
    “Not really poetry. No. Just some thoughts come to my head.”
    “Cameron writes poetry.”
    When she says this, their conversation seems to freeze. Esther’s smile disappears, and she takes on a far-away look, as if she’s hiding her thoughts. Mac hides his too. The word gore has taken him back, and Shevchenko comes to mind:

    Then all the shame of days of old, forgotten,
    Shall no more be told….

    “There’s a rock down there I’d like to show you, Esther. All worn smooth from when the Indian women rubbed off what meat was left on the buffalo hides.”
    “My soup on the stove!” Esther says. “Did I turn the burner off?”
    “You’re making soup?”
    “With the soup bones you gave me. I must have turned it off. No, I remember now. I left the burner on simmer.”
    “The Indian women made soup. They’d just dig a hole in the ground and line it with a bag made of buffalo hide. They’d fill it with water and keep exchanging hot rocks to boil the soup.”
    “But I’m not certain. Did I put the lid on? We’d better get back to town in case I’ve got a mess on the stove.”
    It has stayed cool since the end of July, but it hasn’t frozen. The brome grass keeps growing along each side of the road. Mac can’t remember putting up hay as late as September. Some that’s been cut has been rained on, so Lee has been watching the weather forecasts and hoping for a dry spell before he cuts any more.
    In the early eighties Lee, already married, came home to farm. Mac set him up with a section of land, and he and Peggy moved into town. All these years he’s farmed from town, but when Peggy got cancer he cut back almost completely. He sold all his land to Lee, with long-term payments at no interest. Sold all the land but the coulee, that is. Lee and Darlene have acquired an additional ten thousand acres since – purchased, and rented.
    “Just look at that landscape,” Esther says. “See the flats? See the gleam the sun makes on the far ridge of hills?”
    “And the older we get, Esther, the more it means to us. Our generation’s lifetime is invested out there.”
    “Too many memories, Mac.”
    They come off the grid road over the railway tracks to the highway three miles from town. Mayor Rigley has had street signs put up in Duncan, just like the ones that mark the municipal roads. There are other signs as well,