Read Online A Geography of Blood by Candace Savage - Free Book Online

paid us a visit. The pleasures of these hills were so abundant that there was plenty to go around, and we were eager to share our house with like-minded souls. Our most frequent guests were our daughters, one of whom had stood in the magic circle around the fossil shell, and the other of whom joined the party whenever she was able. It was this second daughter—a bright, practical soul, not given to morbid thoughts—who made an observation that ever since has echoed through my mind. She came into the house one morning, after a walk with the dogs, and said that the hills seemed sad to her. “It feels like something bad must have happened here.”
    â€œSad? Something bad?” I objected. “But it’s so peaceful. So lyrical.” Hadn’t she heard the pair of orioles chanting to one another at their nest? Hadn’t she seen their miraculous silken basket swaying from a cottonwood branch? Hadn’t she noticed the way the morning light was slanting down the valley, filling it to the brim?
    She nodded in vague agreement, but her eyes were already skidding past me to gaze out the window at the river hills. “Maybe it’s just the sense that so much has been happening here for so long. It’s kind of spooky.”
    And I have to admit that she is right: this land is filled with ghosts. Sometimes, especially when Keith and I are settling in for one of our long summer stays, I wake up to find myself troubled by an unaccountable melancholy. It lodges behind my breastbone, a dull, lumpen ache. That’s when I, too, find myself staring out at the river hills and thinking about my own ghosts. That’s when I think about my mother. She died of cancer on a beautiful day in June, and it wasn’t until after she was gone that I began to understand how the view from my window, and the hills beyond, connected me with her.
    That summer was a season of endings. My mother’s death was echoed a few weeks later by the closing-out auction at my grandparents’ farm south of Hanna, Alberta, a place I knew from her stories and from the few awkward visits we made there during my childhood. In recent years, I’d been trying to get her to go back with me, though she had been hard to convince. Once, we made it to the closest town but, with a mere three miles to go, we lost the scent—couldn’t find the right road, too much had changed, she said—and after that she refused to try again. “Why would you want to go there?” one of my uncles asked. The place was being farmed by its owners-in-waiting, the local Hutterite colony, while the last of the Humphreys, my once dashing uncle, cowered inside the beat-up house, drinking himself to an early death.
    And then my uncle was gone, and my mother, and the farm and all of its accoutrements—rows of rusty, disabled equipment set out at the foot of the ramshackle yard—were up for grabs by the highest bidder. What the Stegners had achieved in less than a decade had taken us a hundred years, yet here we were, at the end of days, in “our own special plot of failure.” 1
    When my mother was dying, I know that she often returned to her childhood home in her thoughts. “I never told you very much about my mother,” she’d say, and this time it wasn’t the witch who had tried to give her away to a neighbor that she needed to talk about. “All those babies, one after another, with no running water.” She paused, as if the very thought made her weary. “It must have been hell on earth.”
    Standing in the weedy, dissolute farmyard on auction day, I’m glad that my mother isn’t here to see strangers picking over the bones of her parents’ life work. But there is one thing that I know would have raised her spirits, as it raises mine. Beyond the array of old junk, past the reach of the auctioneer’s babble, across the stubble fields, along the horizon, sprawls a mottled, low-slung