The Bone Mother Read online

  “What’s this about?” my father asked. “You playing games with boys?”

  I realized he would hear about it anyway, so I told him as blandly as I could. “Lukas tossed his ball to me. I threw it back and knocked him down. It was nothing, an accident. I expect I injured his pride as well as his shoulder.”

  Before he could say anymore, we heard a shot, a horse’s screech and a crash. We ran to the side of the church to where the carts and carriages waited, to find two of my father’s friends running towards us. “Your son, your son! He is trapped!” Farther ahead we saw one of the traps had slid into the ditch by the road and fallen, its frightened horse still leaping and bucking as Mr. Malyk and several other men tried to calm it.

  “Father,” I said as I rushed to the side of the carriage, “help me lift it.” He shook his head, stammered, looked to the other men—but they were all looking at us. “Father, put your hands on the carriage and help me.”

  Baffled at his friends and neighbours all standing back and staring, he numbly obeyed me and was stunned as, together, we lifted the carriage up. My brother crawled out crying, dragging his leg below the knee. My mother rushed to him, as did Mrs. Malyk and the doctor’s wife, and the doctor himself joined soon after. The Malyk boys watched sullenly from the corner of the churchyard.

  My father turned to Mr. Malyk, who had finally brought the horse back into rein. “What happened? What was the shot?”

  A woman stepped up, Mrs. Derhak from the post office and general store. “I saw the whole thing,” she said. “A pale young woman with long red hair, she grabbed your boy by the hand, she was trying to take him away. He was struggling but she had a dark power, she—I think she came from the river.”

  “A rusalka,” said Mr. Malyk, and a shiver ran through the crowd. Many young women from the village had drowned in the river. It could have been someone’s long-dead sister, daughter, wife. “I am the one who shot at her, but she threw your boy into the ditch and vanished. The shot spooked the horse, and the cart fell down onto him.”

  “A clean break,” Dr. Krajnik said as he came to us. “I have dressed it for the moment, but we must take him to my office. We can use my carriage.” He turned to me. “I’d also like to examine you, if I may. I think you know why.” I nodded, and together we walked to the doctor’s carriage, which stood parked at the head of the line. I peered in at my brother who was lying across two of the seats.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to tell.”

  Later, my mother and father argued while I held my brother in our room. Father was afraid: apparently some abnormal children in the eastern village had been taken by the authorities, for purposes unknown. For three weeks I was kept from school as my parents circled each other in a sour silence. Then, that last Sunday, as they took my brother to church but left me at home, I gathered my things into the small grey suitcase from under my mother’s side of the bed, and I started walking west. I had seen handbills for a Turkish circus that was visiting Rakhiv. It would take me all day and into the night to reach it, but I no longer tired easily.

  I remained with the circus for nearly two years. We travelled all over Europe. When our tour took us back towards my home, I asked if I could stop and visit. And then I was told, and wouldn’t believe, and had to see for myself: in the brief time that I’d been away, my home, and my village, were gone.

  Luisa

  This was many years ago, back in the first land, when my grandmother was still alive and I was a small child. I would be sent to visit her in the woods, and while she was cooking she would tell me stories of the Bone Mother. The little girl came up to the Bone Mother’s house and knocked on the heavy wooden door. It opened all by itself and the little girl, who was very much like you, saw the Bone Mother at her giant wood stove. There she stood, throwing handfuls of vegetables in a big black pot made of iron, just like her teeth.And then my grandmother would smile with her teeth made of iron, and I would giggle and shiver.

  The Bone Mother lived in a little house deep in the woods, just like my grandmother’s house, where she received visits from lonely young women, children cast out by their heartless parents, and handsome but treacherous men. The Bone Mother could be very wicked or very kind, and sometimes both. Do all I ask and I will reward you. If not, I will eat you up.

  Once, as she was telling these stories, a whimpering came from one of the cages in the darkest corner of the kitchen—from one of her little kurchas, or chicks as she called them. Over she flew like a big black crow, pulled a little hand out of the cage and bit off one of its fingers. As the little kurcha screamed and screamed, my grandmother sat back on her stool, a thin trickle of blood dribbling down to her chin. “There,” she said. “Now you have something to cry about.”

  I never looked too closely at the cages.

  I would visit every Saturday, and always for lunch, and lunch was always a boiled egg, a bit of cheese, a bowl of potato soup, fresh-baked bread and some cold salted meat left over from the night before. She would watch me carefully as I ate, and in particular when I ate the meat, to make sure I finished everything she fed me. Once I eyed my plate suspiciously—the meat was so much like a tiny leg, with a tiny foot at the end and tiny little toes—and I asked her, “Are you the Bone Mother, Babcia?”

  “I might be and I might not,” she answered. “But I will tell you this: I am the oldest of our mother’s daughters and, of all my children’s children, you are the one who will one day take my place. You will live in my house, you will have all my jewels and gold. My cooking pots. My iron teeth. My many visitors. Some will come to you for wisdom, some for strength. Some will come with cakes and wine, asking for help to find true love or to seek revenge. Others will come to cheat and trick you, and even try to kill you. You must protect this house, and our families, and you must protect yourself.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “Is some-thing going to happen? Are you going to die?”

  “Everything dies,” she said simply, “and I am no different. One cannot be afraid. As you become a woman, my time will come to an end. And then, when you are very old, another in our line will take her turn.”

  “But the Bone Mother is a wicked witch who eats naughty children,” I cried. Babcia smiled and pushed my plate closer to me, the little leg glistening in a sauce of butter and herbs. Nervously, I picked it up with my fingers and tore at the meat with my teeth. It was, admittedly, delicious.

  “Good children do taste better,” she said wistfully, “but there are so few of them. If you can be satisfied with naughty children, you will always have food on the table. They are never in short supply.”

  “But I don’t want to be wicked, I don’t want people to be afraid of me. I want to make them happy. I want them to love me.”

  She seemed hurt by this, and became very still, and the whole house grew quiet around her. “I wanted that too,” she said softly. “We all want that at the start. You will see how the world changes you. Your kindness will be met with hate. Your wisdom will be met with fear.”

  I set the bones back down on the plate, stripped of all their flesh. I took a piece of thick white bread and wiped the juice from my plate, and from my chin. My grandmother’s long thick tail, pink and hairless like that of a rat, unfurled from behind her and swept the bones into a bowl to be set aside for roasting.

  “I cannot tell you how to be,” she said, taking my hand. “You can only be who you are. But to be the Bone Mother is to always be hungry. What you eat, and why, depends on you.”

  Two full centuries have passed. I am now the oldest one. The little house is gone, as are the jewels and gold. I have outlived my own children and their children. Few from our families have survived, and those who did so fled to escape the enveloping darkness.

  Yet among those few there is a child, one who will succeed me. She feels the gnawing in her belly and it draws her to my hiding place. For a time, we will dine together. I will tell her my stories, and teach her what she ne
eds to know. Through her, our kind will live anew. I will not be the last.

  Katerina

  To get to my grandmother’s house, if you don’t drive, you have to take a westbound bus from Winnipeg that takes you through Brandon, Portage La Prairie, Gladstone, Neepawa, and finally to Minnedosa. From there you have to call Mr. Huliak who lives just outside of Sandy Lake, and he will come and pick you up. He’s usually around, though you may have to try a few times as he doesn’t always hear the phone. There’s a coffee shop in Neepawa not far from the bus station. It used to be family-run, a place called the Wander-In, but now it’s a Timmy’s. Still, the women who work there have done so for decades, and they will remember you as Joe’s daughter or Will’s niece or the oldest of Nellie’s grandchildren, the one from the city, pat on the cheek. Everyone knows who you are.

  Then you sit with a double-double and a honey cruller encrusted in glaze and wait until Mr. Huliak pulls up in his primer-clad pickup. He won’t step out or even wave, so you have to sit by the window and watch or, if it’s summer, stand outside in case he comes up some funny way, from getting gas or something. Then you toss what’s left of the coffee and cruller and hop into the passenger seat, and he’ll say hello but not much else as he’s never felt good about his English, though he understands you perfectly fine.

  Then he’ll drive up and over and down the curving road south of Riding Mountain, which is barely a hill if truth be told, through the lush greens of midsummer or the reds and golds of fall or the unsullied white of winter, till one more turn takes you to the top of the lane where he stops to let you off. You pull out a ten and insist that he take it, you know how things are up here on these farms. And he does. Are you sure you’re okay from here? Yes, I’m good. Then a nod and he puts the truck into gear, pulls away and drives off.

  Except this time, this one time, another voice answered, right on the first ring: a woman’s voice, my age, a bit older, and weary. “Is Mr. Huliak there?” I asked.

  “He died a few months ago,” she said. “I’m his daughter, Riva. Who’s this?”

  This was so unexpected, I let out a little gasp, then caught myself, forced myself through the moment and apologized, said who I was, whose daughter I was. She sounded vague and uncomfortable, as if just up from a nap. I reminded her of our occasional meetings as children at one house or another, awkward lunches and teas in stiff flowered dresses when we’d rather have been playing outside.

  “I see you now,” she said—a funny phrase, as if she could tune me in like a radio, lock onto some weak signal and through it find my face. “Someone told me yesterday that your grandmother passed, I guess it didn’t register. It’s been a hell of a year. Were you wanting a ride out to her place?”

  “Well,” I said haltingly, “if you know someone that I could call—”

  “I’ll come get you,” she answered. “It’s all good, I have the truck, I should get some use out of it.” I tried to talk her out of it but she was hard-headed like her father, and maybe a bit lonely, too. She was on her way out the door before I’d even hung up.

  Mr. Huliak usually took twenty minutes to drive to the coffee shop, and Riva arrived just a few minutes shy of that, rounding the corner with a faint squeal and bump-bumping up into the lot. I could still see the five- six- and ten-year-old Riva in her flinty eyes and solid jaw, her lightly freckled nose and cheeks—she had a solid no-nonsense look about her, with some silvery grey threaded through her long dark hair. There shouldn’t have been so much distance between us, but she had been in school when I wasn’t and vice-versa; at those times when two girls could have grown closer, we drifted apart. Still, her face warmed slightly to see me, and I smiled in return. We were each glad to see someone who was neither a stranger nor a busybody.

  I stepped into the cab of the truck and pulled the door shut behind me, gave her a light short “city hug” and asked, “You know the way?”

  “Pass it every day,” she said, then pulled back out of the parking spot, spun the wheel and hit the gas.

  To catch a ride with someone local from Minnedosa to Sandy Lake, and especially if you now live in the city, you first ask your driver about weather and the crops, who’s alive and who’s not, if anyone has left in the last few years and where they’ve gone, and who you might both know in Winnipeg, or Toronto, or out west in B.C. Even with friends or neighbours or family members, the ritual remains the same.

  These conversations have different rhythms and rules from those that you have in the city, and settling into them can take some time. Some are just single words batted back and forth across the front seats.

  “Josef?”

  “Dead.”

  “How?”

  “Pneumonia.”

  “Awful.”

  “Winter.”

  “Kids?”

  “Gone.”

  “Sad.”

  “Mmm.”

  Others devolve into tangled monologues shot through with odd but telling details that hint at the causes, and the results, of otherwise inscrutable small-town behaviour. Bad debts, family fights, drunken brawls, police visits. After the city, and its relentless prying about your work, your parents, your home life, your curious singlehood—it’s a relief to sit back and talk about other people, people who you know by name but not to speak to, people worse off than you, whose misfortunes are a welcome distraction from your own.

  This time though, this one particular time with Riva, she asked as she was driving along the short stretch of highway, squinting against the sun: “Do you ever wonder what would happen if you just disappeared?”

  I looked over at her and slowly shook my head, but confused—as if what she had said had come out all wrong, a puzzle I had to piece together. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  “Would anyone look for you, would you be missed?” She gave me a hard look that was almost a glare. “How long would it be before you were forgotten?” She turned away, gave that same hard look to the road ahead. “This stretch of highway, from here to Elphinstone, and down some of these side roads—over the last few years, maybe ten years or so—a dozen women, maybe more, just vanished. Women, and a few children.”

  “Women from town?” I managed to ask. “From the farms?”

  “No,” she said. “Just passing through, on their way from somewhere to somewhere. One time last year, I guess in the spring, still snow on the ground, they found a blue Honda on the shoulder up here. Baby seat in the back, everything buckled and fastened and locked. The mum and the baby were gone. Hood still warm. No one in sight. Cops were out here, the RCMP, flashlights in the fields and around all the outbuildings, knocking door to door. Never found them. All of them like that, over the years.”

  Riva fell silent for a moment, then asked again. “Well?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered slowly. Words carefully chosen. “I like to think people would look for me. I like to think I’d be missed, that I wouldn’t be forgotten. Every time I go online now, I get one message or another—two years since so-and-so died, we miss him every day.”

  “I don’t think there’s anyone that would miss me every day,” Riva replied. Not sadly, not sharply—just matter-of-fact. A tiny knot pulled tight in the pit of my stomach. And then: “Does anyone know you’re here?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The estate lawyer. My co-workers. My ex. They all have names and numbers, including the coffee shop, including your dad’s. Which I guess means yours. Why?”

  “No reason,” she said. “It’s always good to be cautious.” She suddenly veered into the shoulder and stepped on the brake, sending gravel and dust clouds everywhere. “Is this where he used to let you off?” I looked past her, and saw the road down to the farm, as familiar as an old friend’s face, then looked back at her and nodded. “Do you want me to drive you down?”

  I shook my head. “No, that’s fine. The walk will do me good.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “Call me when you’re ready to head back. You can pay me then.”<
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  I grabbed my bag, my light summer jacket, stepped out of the truck and watched her drive off. Between Minnedosa and Elphinstone. Highway and side roads —thirty miles give or take. Sandy Lake was along that stretch, and Newdale, too. Twelve over ten years didn’t seem like that many. And “missing” could mean anything. Sometimes people just leave. Sometimes women just leave, and take their children with them. Sometimes people just vanish.

  To get to my grandmother’s house from the highway, you walk south down a long worn dirt road for about a mile, past low brush and long grasses and foxtails, when you reach a bend that tugs you back east, down a soft slope between two stands of huddled pines, until you reach the curved driveway, the garage, the house itself on the left, the chicken coop off to the side, and the barn and the old house, the first house, down a winding path through a thicket of brush speckled with Saskatoon berries. Your thoughts are bright and warm like the first sunshine after a long rain, and you know that when you’re in sight of the kitchen, your baba will rush out to greet you, throw her arms around you, then usher you in and pull out dishes and plates full of sweet red beets and boiled eggs and cucumbers in vinegar that she always seems to have waiting. She’ll fret and fuss over how thin you are, she’ll ask about boys, she’ll pat your hair and hold your hand—

  But not this time. This time, I crossed the highway—pulling up my collar against the sudden chill. Frost can come even in June, killing things in the night that had only just struggled to the surface. I made my way down the long worn road that led to the farm, casting my eyes from side to side the way I did as a girl, looking for lost treasures. I reached the bend in the road, turned the corner, and as I drew closer I could see something ahead of me, something on the driveway, facing me as if to greet me or as if to warn me: a chair.