Country of Lent

Bukoski 49 Anthony Bukoski Country of Lent Spring is no good. On Good Friday everything is gray with patches of snow in the woods. Out on the sand island, a heron stands in the reeds. "Look it," my husband says. He has been drinking. He stumbles on the railroad tracks, hurts his knee. The heron glides forward into the shallows, one leg folded up to its body. "Look," Gerald Bluebird says to me again. Two of the herons nest on the island by the abandoned tracks. They are easy-to-frighten birds. He watches them climb over the island where the beaver build in the calm, where the herring gulls try out their fishing. He says to me, "You ever seen anything so out of place?" We have come to live where we, or he, hasn't been in thirty years. Two weeks ago he wrote on a piece of cardboard: Baby Girl Bluebird— February 14-March 31, 1991 —and put the card in the baby's gown. Then he started drinking. If you go upriver, there lies our baby. Once in a while I nursed her, but after, when my face was in shadow with the lights off, I felt sick and promised her no more tit. The old woman, the mother-in-law, rocked her, but the baby grew weaker. Now it's the Left-Handed River we hear, Gerald wondering if anybody but us who buried the baby in the box can hear her crying on Good Friday. "No use," he says later in the house. He has black hair and eyebrows. His eyes, the light brown color of dried hazelnuts, look tired, have black marks under them. "You're stupid staying in the house," I tell him. "Where else is there?" he says. "I don't know. Nowhere." I pull my hair into braids, hold them with turquoise bands. I smear the lipstick in a crooked line. I don't care how I look when the late winter fires haunt me and the aspen sap is bitter. The old woman who lives in the house, she turns down the radio and doesn't read the newspaper, though we know like everybody around what's going on with the white man, Chimokoman, who has this thing called PARR to fight us on the lakes and in the woods. "What's it mean?" I ask him again. "Protect America's Rights and Resources," Gerald says. "Treaties don't mean nothing to them." 50 the minnesota review "The love of Christ is in us," the old woman says when she sees us with the beers. We're going to church," he says. "No use staying in the house," I tell her. "We're going." In the town a half-mile away, the buildings lean over this way and that. Everything's gray. There's nothing in the old town. Some day the Lake Superior wind will push it all down. "It's Good Friday," Gerald says, and kicks a piece of broken pavement. "The white man come in to drink last night when you were drinking?" I ask him. "Some of them after church. They line up today, then somebody wipes the lipstick off the feet of the cross at church," he says. "Good Friday. Somebody kisses the plaster feet of the statue." "I'm not interested," I tell him. We sit in a booth in the bar. The dark, old place is 100 years old. The wood floor bends towards the back like Lake Superior waves have come beneath it. On the street are plenty of other bars, the Castaway, the Bolero, Eli's. This is the only deserted one. Since the baby died, I've been in a couple times. "Nothing come of that baby," Gerald says. He's older than me. Leaning against the back of the booth, he turns off the little lamp. Beer's been spilt on the shade. The floor is sticky under my shoes. "No baby could've lived in this country," I tell him. He's wearing his deerskin vest. He looks flushed, dark. The fat guy wiping down the bar puts on a fresh apron and stares out the dusty...