Bone Coulee Read Online Free

“Can I go spend it at the store?”
    “A doll yesterday and money today. A spoiled girl.” Anne-Marie adds a handful of oatmeal to thicken her soup, now bubbling in the cast-iron pot. She is fifty-five, a widow, a mother and a grandmother. She is Kokum to all the little ones while the adults go to the bushes to cut pickets, or to the farmers’ fields to pick their rocks. The women pick berries. Tonight the men are in town helping Thomas spend his winnings.
    “Someone should go with you,” Anne-Marie says. “Maybe Stella will go.”
    Stella answers from inside the tent. “I’ll go. As soon as the baby falls asleep.”
    “I will look after the baby,” Anne-Marie says. “But have soup before you go. Here, I have some money.” She produces two crumpled dollar bills from within the folds of her dress and hands them to Roseanna to give to Stella. “The soup needs more neck bones. Ask Mr. Minski for a quarter’s worth. And sardines. They are only ten cents, but hurry to get back before dark.”

    The girls walk along the backstretch of the empty track. They can see the swinging chairs of the Ferris wheel, nearly all of them empty. Workers dismantle the merry-go-round. In front of the barns, a man leads a horse up into a closed-in truck box. The big animal’s hooves clunk on the wooden ramp. Racing sulkies are mounted on truck roofs. Three men stand in a barn doorway. They smoke, drink beer and watch Roseanna and Stella walk by.
    A man carries a set of snare drums up the steps of the dance hall. Three others follow with musical instruments in black cases. The girls hurry down the two blocks, past Rigley Motors John Deere to the hotel.
    They notice Thomas, and Stella’s husband, Harry, standing behind the hotel’s fire-escape staircase. Roseanna wonders where Ben and Charlie are. Ben Star is her brother Thomas’s best friend, and Roseanna thinks he likes her. Maybe they are playing pool. An old-looking white guy wearing a dirty suit jacket with a torn elbow holds out his hand and Thomas gives him money. Stella pokes Roseanna.
    “They are buying beer.” The girls watch for another moment, then proceed along the front street to the store.
    Kokum said they could buy oranges. The fruit sits piled in bins by the front windows…oranges, grapefruit, lemons…overflowing in the bins, and a banana tree hangs from a hook on the ceiling.
    “Oranges?” Mr. Minski says, wiping his hands on his cheesecloth rag, and then he reaches under the counter for a brown paper bag.
    “A dozen,” Stella says. “And a quarter’s worth of neck bones. Two cans of sardines.”
    The girls examine the open boxes arrayed on a platform shelf. Fig bar cookies are stacked upright in layers divided with wax paper. Chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies. Gingersnaps. Open boxes of cookies are set all along the platform, with a second shelf underneath with boxes of dried apples, dates, raisins and apricots. Against the wall behind the shelves sits a big round of cheddar cheese on a wheel that turns if Mr. Minski cranks a lever. And it has a big cleaver attached to cut the cheese.
    “A quarter’s worth of those cookies,” Stella says, pointing to the fig bars.
    On the other side of the store are shelves filled with all kinds of clothing and material. The store has towels, flannel sheets, wool blankets, work pants and coveralls, shirts, rolls and rolls of cotton print. In behind these shelves, on the shelves against the wall, are paper boxes filled with panties, brassieres, slips and stockings. Roseanna opens a box of silk scarves. She’d like a purple one to wear around her neck.
    “What colour would you like, Stella? We can get three for a dollar. We can buy one for Kokum.”
    “The red one,” Stella says. “And a green one for Kokum.”
    When the girls leave the store, it’s already getting dark. They proceed up the side of the muddy street, a more quiet route back to the camp…away from the beer parlour…and the dance hall.

    Mac