![]() “I know him to see him,” I replied, my hands aching from their slumber of fists. “What if he had a beard now?” Raymond said, picking at the dash for his pack of Exports, his eyes on the road. “Gupsin?” I said, jumping out of a dream with fists and terror. ![]() “Do you remember what he looks like?” Raymond said as the headlights from an oncoming car framed his bandit eyes. They were the first I met at the Mission. His fingers were dark, dry, and cracked with bursts and breaches in the skin. And, though he was not a small person, he moved around nearly silently, appearing without warning, with a persistent and foreboding calm, like a storm that never fully crested. His shoulders had a strength commonly found in hay-bale cowboys. When his face stopped smiling, it found that small space of emptiness it recognized as home. That is when he looked particularly lost. He was lean and sullen with a confused, homesick look in his eyes that really came to the fore when he smiled. It wasn’t until I saw an eagle clutch a rabbit’s neck with its talons that I knew my own hands offered the solution.īrother Felix’s body was in perpetual flinch. A hammer with a snatched handle, a fracture deep in the wood but oblivious to the eye, is trouble. Reliance on an instrument makes the item too important, an invitation for fallibility. And, for each task, we used specific tools. Farms teach a lot about pain, how much trauma a body can take before it succumbs, and the futility of a drawn-out death. Looking through the glovebox, my mind became a plate of leftover dreams and memories. small hammer, for fence repair and shed construction.auger, used for divination and fence posts.One legible page read, “An inventory of farm tools and their purposes: ![]() 30-06, some fishing line, two empty packages of smokes, a 1970 Eaton’s catalogue dog-eared to ladies’ fashions, and a Department of Indians Affairs pamphlet titled “An Indian’s Guide to Farming.” The pamphlet was more of a fragment than a cohesive work, the text stained from oil and coffee. Back on the road, I rummaged around the car, looking for a map, and somehow got caught up in the various items from Les’s glovebox: a few shells for the. Somewhere before Revelstoke, I pulled over to take a piss and let Raymond drive for a bit. What gas it likes, how close to empty looks like hope, how empty looks like a lost horizon. It tells you things that aren’t measured on the dashboard. To really know your car, you have to know the tank. Though the Impala was pushing empty, the ride down from the summit gave us reason to believe we would make it to Revelstoke to gas up. Yet we were the soil that the Mission ground down day after day, month after month, and beyond. A symmetry of passing lovers, not a land of monotheistic agrarians. Such dedication required much faith in ʔamakʔis Ktunaxa, where winter is present or promising at least half of the year, the other cut between seasons of heat, sun, rain, thunder, and the restless cold of late spring and early autumn. God and Jesus aside, the Mission was dedicated to the training and production of farm workers. Saint Mary’s River coldly wrought the edge of the Mission to the north, blocking the Mission’s expansion toward the reserve’s hoodoos, while to the south, the road to town led to bedlam and Christian civilization. A series of smaller ancillary buildings reinforced the Mission, and broken, fallow farmland covered either side of the building. T he Mission was a red-brick building where I had once lived for most of the year.
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