The Cast Stone Read online

  The

  Cast Stone

  The

  Cast Stone

  Harold Johnson

  © Harold Johnson, 2011

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  118 - 20th Street West

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  The cast stone / Harold Johnson.

  ISBN 978-1-897235-89-8

  I. Title.

  PS8569.O328C38 2011 C813’.6 C2011-905348-9

  Cover: photographic detail of Gag by Kate McGwire

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.

  The

  Cast Stone

  THE EARLY SUN FLASHED OFF THE ALUMINUM gunwale, a silent flare amid thousands of sparkles where brilliance smashed into rippled water. The boat rocked gently to the rhythm of the man’s pull on the net. He stood in the bow, feet set apart and pulled hand over hand, a steady draw that moved the boat incrementally forward, stopping now to kneel for a moment as he untangled a pickerel, pulled the net mesh from the sharp teeth, the head free. He clawed the remainder of the mesh over the thick-skinned body and dropped the prize-sized fish into a plastic tub, stood, and resumed lifting the net.

  The pickerel changed the man’s thoughts. His eyes lifted from the net that slanted into the water in front of him and found the blue green hills off the western shore, where the scars of industrial logging blotched brown smears against the boreal, smears that leached mud and silt into the streams where pickerel spawn. His thoughts followed the silt flow down the ancient hills into the once rich lake, swam through the weed beds and rushes back to the boat that floated on beige water and the mostly empty net.

  He turned his head to look toward the northeast for a moment. There, where the horizon was flatter, where muskeg began at the shoreline and spread back for kilometres of wetland, of moss and stunted spruce and tamarack, the death of the fish began there. Acid: sulphuric and nitric, built up, absorbed from the wind, held there during the dry periods and winter and pulsed out during the spring flood, when snow melted and filled the bog and overflowed into the lake. The acid concentrations poured into the water at the same time that the pickerel found the small streams to lay and fertilize eggs.

  The pickerel disappeared. Their death was sudden. Fisher people scratched their heads, stood on the shore and stared at the water. The government biologists scratched their heads, took water samples, and went back to their offices to write reports that never completely answered the question. As lake after lake died, fishers began to understand that the dominant northwest wind was bringing acid from the tar sands refineries. It wasn’t just killing the lakes, it was killing the trees. The pine were turning red, the birch were not producing leaves. They stood barren and dry and over the years the memory of their lushness began to fade.

  With the last of the net into the boat, the rock anchors and white plastic jugs that served as buoys stowed in the belly between the seats, Ben Robe released the clasp and lowered the motor’s leg into the water. He thought for a second of using the electric start, decided against it, and pulled on the starter cord. The four-stroke engine purred into life. The electric start was there for when Ben was old. Today he decided at sixty-seven he was still too young to use it.

  The boat clipped the water, resonated dull metallic thumps with each wave, a sound that betrayed the boat’s heavier than normal construction. Ben gave silent thanks for the fish as he rode, one hand on the tiller, throttle open three-quarters across the lake, gave thanks for the new day, for the sun, for the sky, for the water, for his good health. Dread thoughts found him and he pushed them away, accepted the day as it was, a good day, a day of sunshine and wind. He followed the east shore of Moccasin Lake for a distance then cut across the large open end towards the reserve at the south.

  A speck in the distance grew into a bird, a small bird flying straight toward him, something unusual. The bird did not belong out on the water. Here gulls swooped and swirled or followed the boat, chased for a moment, hung in the air on slender wings then slid away. Eagles sometimes waited high in a dead tree near the shore until the boat drew too close for comfort before they dropped, spread their wide black wings and powered away with forceful thrusts that lifted and carried them over the trees and out of sight. Cormorants formed packs and hunted fish. Long lines of large black birds chased fish across the surface of the lake, hundreds of silent hunters worked together to drive a school, lifted off the water to land again in front of the wave of feeding birds, a constant feed, lift, land, and eat.

  The little brown bird did not belong out here. It did not fit. It belonged in the willows close to his cabin. Shy and quiet, patient in the summer heat, it was a bird that moved slowly and never for any distance, a seed eater.

  Ben watched it beat the air, fight the wind with rapid wing strokes and struggle straight for him. Straight and purposefully, its short wings never intended for long flights, it should not have been here on the water. It was out of place; a message, a warning, an abnormality to pay attention to. The bird belonged at the cabin. Someone is coming to visit. The thought came unbeckoned seemingly from nowhere, the way intuition always defies logic. Ben opened the throttle full and the boat responded, lifted a little higher in the water and clipped the waves a little quicker.

  When the fish were prepared, and the cabin was cleaned, and the dishes done and a pot of tea was set on the table beside a new box of cookies opened on one end, the clear plastic wrap torn back in invitation, Rosie knocked at the door. Another abnormality, Rosie never knocked.

  “Why are you beating on my door? Have you got something against it?”

  “Just bein’ polite, I didn’t want to interrupt. Never know what you’re doin’ in here by yourself.” Rosie noticed the clean swept floor and kicked off her shoes; she had seen the cookies and was heading straight for them.

  “How’s your diabetes this morning?”

  “You are a mean son-of-a-bitch, Ben. Mean!” She pushed the word through her teeth, curled her lips back in a snarl to stifle the smile that was trying to betray her feigned anger.

  “Help yourself.”

  “Oh, you are a mean bastard Ben. Put them away.” Rosie opened a cupboard, moved aside a heavy black mug with Z99 Radio blazoned all over it and selected her favourite thin, white china cup, the one with the little blue and purple flowers. Before she poured the tea, she folded back the plastic wrap on the package of cookies and put them in the wooden breadbox on the counter, the box with the lid that could shut.

  She settled heavily into a chair, rose slightly to slide it back from the table for a little more room, then lowered her weight fully before she leaned a shoulder against the log wall. “You always make a good cup of tea.”

  “Did you want some sugar for that?”

  “Fuck you, I’m tryin’ to be nice. Sometimes I wonder if the only reason you came back was to give me a hard time.”

  Ben couldn’t hold the laugh back; it oozed out, a little rolling chuckle. “Give you a h
ard time?” His eyebrows raised above his deep grey eyes. The forked lines around the edges showed lighter than the wind and sun-darkened face. “Give you a hard time.” He repeated the words because of their ridiculousness.

  His laugh spread itself thinly through the cabin, wrapped around Rosie and melted her pretension of anger. She jiggled, set down her cup of tea before it spilled, and let her mirth mingle with his. Her higher pitch laugh played with his deep quiet rumble, the laughs twisted together and became one sound that reverberated gently around the room and chased away anything of remorse or shadow.

  This was the reason Ben had returned to the community on the shore of the lake. He had said it was for the quiet, for the return to nature, for tranquility, but in reality it was for the company of laughter, to share, to belong. Here in the cabin he built with his own hands, where the logs soaked up the water from broken blisters, where he was warm and dry, fed and belonged, where memories had roots. Here with Rosie, the little girl from his childhood, the little girl that used to follow him, shyly. Rosie who stood in the shadow, with cotton flowered dress and moccasins. Little shy Rosie, smiled and looked away when he glanced at her, then followed at a distance, a kit fox pretending to hunt but still too full of play.

  “Yeah, give me a hard time.” Rosie again feigned sternness. “I came here try’n to be nice and you give me a hard time.” “Okay, Rosie. I’ll apologize. I shouldn’t pick on you. But I was just getting you first before you jumped me like usual.”

  “Maybe you should lend me twenty bucks for being mean.”

  “Is that what you came over for? To borrow a twenty?”

  “Well, yeah, but since you were mean to me, you should just give me twenty instead of lending it.”

  “I suppose.” It really didn’t matter to Ben whether he loaned or gave Rosie a bit of money in the middle of the month. In the three years that he had been home she had never repaid a loan or reciprocated a gift. Not that Rosie lacked in generosity or gratitude. The little welfare that she received did not leave any cash over to match the greatness of her heart.

  “I sometimes wonder Ben, whether you have a stash somewhere.” Rosie stuffed the twenty into a pocket. “You can stretch a pension cheque further than anyone else.”

  “I don’t play bingo.” Ben responded quickly.

  “And you don’t drink. But even so, you seem to always have money when everyone else has run out.”

  The accusation had more power than Rosie knew. It forced Ben to keep a steady face, forced him to calculate his response, his words, his actions. He chose not to respond and let silence do its work. It did. Rosie finished her tea, rinsed her cup, and put it in the cupboard. Never let it be said that a man washed dishes for her.

  Lester tried to read the words on the bus ticket, but the letters were nonsense. He closed his left eye and some of the reversed letters reverted to normal. The C and the L he remembered, yeah, the M was there. The ticket should say he was going to Moccasin Lake. He handed it to the man in the grey uniform, hoped he was the bus driver and not someone else. The man looked at the ticket and handed it back. Unsure but unwilling to allow anyone to see that he was unsure; Lester entered the bus. No one stopped him. He sat in a tall back seat with his small pack on his lap, his cheek against the cool glass, and watched the people move around the bus depot, watched for trouble. He saw no sign of anything that might be out of place, not that he knew what normal was out here. He wondered whether his ability to know when trouble was coming would work here in this world. Would he know when to shrink into a wall, find a corner, and become invisible.

  The bus filled. Lester watched faces. Men he understood. Knew their way of walking, their mood. Women he could not read at all. They walked strangely, sounded strange. The bus continued to fill and pressurize. He turned back to the window, to the bright green building and black asphalt parking lot.

  “Is it okay to sit here?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Sure.” I sound like an idiot he thought.

  The driver closed the door and it did not clang and echo the way prison doors sound.

  She was sitting close. Lester could smell her. The smell of diesel fuel and turpentine filled his nostrils. The base of her perfume overwhelmed the scent she had so carefully chosen. Or rather it was lost on Lester, or Lester had lost the ability to smell that particular aroma and only the turpentine that the scent was mixed with filled the thin air between them. Lester turned away, his cheek against the tinted glass and tried to breathe.

  The bus rolled out of the little prairie city, crossed the arch of a long bridge across an ancient river, turned through an overpass, and headed due north. Lester watched the new prairie, the land turned by the rush of homesteaders a century before. People who hated trees and pushed the forest line two hundred miles further than the old buffalo hunters’ wintering sites. They were easy to hate. Wealthy farmers with big tractors bright red or John Deere green and fancy pickups on the way to town, fat wives and fat children.

  The land changed and so did the traffic; now there were more logging trucks. They still hated trees, slashed them down and hauled them to the mill to make paper to wipe their fat arses with. Lester wished he could breathe, wished the woman would get off the bus at one of the tiny dying farm towns where the bus stopped, unloading parcels from its undercarriage. But she sat there in her stink, eating some kind of health food bar, nibbled on it, one tiny bit of oatmeal at a time and flipped the pages of a picture magazine, stared long at photos of celebrities on glossy paper.

  Abruptly the prairie came to an end. The bus rounded a corner and began up a long incline and the last farmhouse and bright red barn disappeared behind a stand of spruce. From here to the Arctic Circle was boreal forest; trees, lakes, rivers, muskeg and Indians. Lester was home. Twenty-four years, eight times three is twenty-four, three manslaughters, consecutive, a bargain. Not one minute off the sentence, every damn second of the judge’s pronouncement. They had to let him out, couldn’t keep him any longer. Fuck the parole board and early release, Lester Bigeye was free. They couldn’t send him back. He was completely out. Not on parole. The last eight years had been tough. Ever since that fat cow had said: “Lester Bigeye, your application for parole has been declined. This board finds that you are an unsuitable candidate due to your inability to take responsibility for your actions.” Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”

  They filled him with hope before every Parole Board hearing and took that hope away from him every time. Now he was beyond their reach. Lester was home and the trees were still there, beautiful poplars in full, dark mid-summer leaf, and tall spruce with spread boughs like a jingle dress dancer’s skirts. The roadside flashed past and Lester caught sight of wildflowers. Flowers that he had forgotten. Brown-eyed Susans and lilies. There were still a few wild roses out. Summer was still young.

  Moccasin Lake Reserve was where it was supposed to be; where the sign said it would be, at the end of eight miles of gravel road off the main paved highway that headed north to the mining towns, but it was nothing like the place Lester left. New metal-sided buildings stood over the places he remembered. The band hall was gone and something that might be a skating rink stood in its place. There was a chain link fence around where the schoolyard had been. The new building with steel poles placed architecturally above the entrance to look like a teepee had replaced the old school that he had attended. Then Lester saw the lake, blue and green with white streamers of foam and he knew that he was home.

  The house by the lake, up the short, sandy road, amid tall spindly black spruce wasn’t there. Lester was not expecting to find his car, the burgundy 1972 Monte Carlo, but he hoped the house would still be there. The house was gone. The car sat flat on the ground without wheels, glassless. Its windows long past the targets of kids with slingshots just for the wonderful tinkle sound glass makes when a stone passes through it. Poplars grew up through where the hood had been removed. Someone had taken the engine, Lester’s pride — a Chevy big block that roa
red and spun gravel. He smelled the mould of rotted seats when he put his head through the gaping driver’s window. The tape deck was still there, under the dash, an eight track add on. Someone must have needed door parts; the inside of the passenger door lay across the front seat. Lester thought he remembered electric windows. Something caught his eye and he forced the door to open, to creak against rust and time. He knelt and reached under the seat.

  Canadian Club whisky, a twenty-sixer, right where he left it, and still a quarter full. He remembered putting it there, remembered the smooth feel of the neck of the bottle in his hand as he stashed it. He remembered slamming the car door and the solid weight of the 30:30 rifle, the chill of the cold lever action against his knuckles and the steps toward the house.

  Ben stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame and looked out at the parallel indentations of sand that led to where his truck sat. They couldn’t be called a driveway, just the marks of driving over the same ground again and again from the gravel road to the log house with its narrow deck all along the front. The logs had begun to yellow nicely, the way pine does, its own sap and pitch acting like an expensive treatment. Or maybe it captured sunlight and held it in its stickiness, glued the sun to the logs.

  The cabin was square and solid with a low-pitched green metal roof. “Guaranteed for fifty years.” The lumberyard attendant had tapped the pile of metal with his toe. “A little bit more expensive, but probably worth it.”

  “Fifty years sounds about right. I don’t imagine it will be me who changes it. I’ll be a hundred and fourteen.” And they’d loaded the sheets onto the back of Ben’s truck.

  The little brown bird was back in the willow clump. It sounded a melodic “tchi tchi, tchi, whooi, whooi, tchi, tchi.”

  “You didn’t fly all the way out there to tell me that Rosie was coming to borrow a twenty.” Ben stepped gently away from the door. The song sparrow shifted positions in the clump of willow and gave another version of its song.