Vicki Laveau-Harvie - The Erratics

Tens of thousands of years ago, the Cordilleran Ice Sheet snaked down the east side of the Alaskan Rocky Mountains, through what is now the province of Alberta in Canada, and into the U.S. state of Montana. As it moved, it deposited gigantic rocks called erratics along its path. These form what is known as the Foothills Erratics Train.

One of those huge boulders sits in a landscape of uncommon beauty a few miles from the Canadian town of Okotoks. The town takes its name from the Blackfoot word for the rock, Okatok.

Countless years ago, the Okotoks Erratic broke in two and became unsafe to climb upon. A Blackfoot legend recounts that it fractured as it thundered across the landscape in pursuit of Napi, the Blackfoot trickster character. He had rested on the rock and left his cloak as an offering of thanks, but when it began to rain, he took it back. Furious, the rock chased after him. None of his animal friends could stop it, until finally the bats broke it in two along a fault line and saved him.

The Erratic dominates the landscape, roped off and isolated, the danger it presents to anyone trespassing palpable and documented on the signs posted around it.

CHAPTER 1

My sister unhooks the chart from the foot of my mothers bed and reads.

My mother is not in the bed. My sister takes her pen, which is always to hand, around her neck or poked into a pocket and, with the air of entitlement of a medical professional, writes MMA in large letters at the bottom of the chart.

MMA.

Mad as a meat-ax.

My sister learned this expression from me yesterday. She has latched on to it like a child wresting a toy from another.

We have come to visit my mother, in rehab for a broken hip in this prairie hospital, a place that could be far worse than it is. It is set down here, plain and brown, on flat farmland, but the foothills start rolling westward just outside town and you see them from the windows. They roll on, smooth, rhythmic, and comforting, until they bump into the stern and inscrutable face of the Rockies eighty miles thataway.

In summer the fields are sensible, right-angled squares of sulfur-yellow and clean, pale green, rapeseed and young wheat. In winter the cold will kill you. Nothing personal. Your lungs will freeze as Christmas lights tracing the outlines of white frame houses wink cheerfully through air so clear and hard it shatters.

MMA, I say. They wont know what that means. You dont say that here in Southern Alberta, even in urban centers. Its a down-underism, an antipodeanism. Maybe theyll see that on the chart and give her some medication called MMA and kill her.

Do we care? my sister asks. She hangs the chart back on the foot of the bed as my mother wheels into the room, gaunt, her favorite look, with a black fringe and bobbed hair. Hats off for carrying that off at ninety. Her sinewy hands coerce the wheels of her chair forward faster than you are supposed to go if you need this chair.

She is wearing a hospital gown and a pair of fuchsia boxer shorts. Not hers. Obviously not hers.

She remarks that it is strange that she cannot have her own things to wear, that she must wear this strange outfit. We dont think to question. We believe in strange. We believe whatever. Theres no other way to go at this.

We have run the nurses station gauntlet to get to her. We have announced ourselves at the counter as her daughters, on our first visit to this rehab ward. We are her daughters, we say, when challenged about why we are in this corridor.

No, youre not, the nurse says, not even looking up from her papers.

But we are. Were sure.

No, she insists. She only had one daughter and she died a long time ago. Now she has none.

My sister cries out from the heart, startling me. Look at me, she cries. Do I look dead?

I dont think she is looking too good, but there is something more pressing. Why, I ask her, are you the daughter who gets to exist? Even if youre dead now. Not to put too fine a point on it but if anyone should get to be dead, its me. I was born first.

The physio strolling by stops to ask who we are and what the matter is. We stare at her, wanting to say all that is the matter, wanting to unroll the whole carpet of what is the matter and smooth it out, drawing attention to the motifs, combing the fringed edges into some order, vacuuming the patterned surface until clarity emerges. We wonder how to begin.

They are saying, the nurse tells the physio, that theyre the duchesss daughters. But she has no children.

Youve got it wrong, the physio says. Little bird of a person, youd never know it of her, but she had eighteen kids. Imagine, eighteen. And only one boy. Heartbroken she was. Told me herself. In tears. Oh, she had kids all right. Nobody around when you need them though.