Crow

by Amy Spurway

  “Most boring tree I ever saw,” Mama grunts every time she walks by it.

  “You said I could buy new decorations.”

  “I know, but I didn’t know you’d be so friggin’ boring about it. Nanny’s bubble lights would have been fine. And you didn’t leave a branch for Dough Baby.”

  Right. Dough Baby.

  When I was seven, Peggy gave me a lump of bread dough so I’d shut up and leave her alone while she babysat me one day. I made a wildly deformed “gingerbread girl” that Peggy baked, and tried to shame me into eating. Because there were children starving in Africa who would give their left foot for a bite of that dough blob. I told her to send it to Africa, because I wasn’t eating it. But Peggy had a better idea. Paint it and give it to Mama as a Christmas present. So I did. It was ugly as sin. Weighed a ton. A coat of lacquer so thick it would be off-gassing for a decade. Every year, as I’d watch Mama wrestle it onto the thickest branch of the tree, I’d find myself wishing I’d just eaten the damn thing instead.

  “You said you just wanted the tree to look good. Those colours are straight out of a magazine,” I say. “And you always hated Dough Baby.”

  “Why would you say that?” Mama says.

  “Because all you ever did was make fun of it and bitch about how it dragged all the branches down. It’s an old glob of nasty bread dough soaked in shellac. It’s no big deal.” I shrug.

  “Maybe not to you it isn’t,” Mama says, not even almost cheerfully.

  […]

  The Fortune Family Christmas Eve festivities that we are hosting this year are a lot less complicated because Uncle Gord’s off the wagon in a bad way, Aunt Audrey found Jesus, and neither of them is speaking to Peggy. Wacky uncle Cecil is hunkered down in his makeshift Armageddon camp behind the Pizza Hut with a new sleeping bag and a case of canned beans. And Uncle Ernie’s in the clink again for shoplifting the new can opener he was going to give Cecil for Christmas, to go with the sleeping bag and case of beans he stole for his birthday. Instead of a house full of our chaotic relations, and a big spread of food and booze, we’re down to a small family turkey dinner.

  As such, the Fortune Family Christmas Eve festivities that we are hosting just got a lot more complicated because it will only be me, Mama, Peggy, and Char’s baby. And Uncle Mossy. But he doesn’t say anything, so he doesn’t count.

  Peg sits across from me with Daktari on her lap. She dips her bloated finger into a bowl of lukewarm gravy and pops it in his mouth. He slurps and coos, and the second he stops, she pulls her finger out, loads it up with more gravy and shoves it back in his mouth before he can protest.

  “Char wants him vegetarian, you know,” I say, before dumping back the last swallow of my first glass of wine in weeks. It’s Christmas Eve, dammit. Probably my last. I should be basking in the joy of family and making merry with friends. But my family’s too messed up to bask in anything other than its own long-standing dysfunction, and my friends are a little short on merriment themselves.

  For weeks, Allie has responded to all my texts — friendly questions like Any word on that job interview? or Your father and brothers smarten up yet? or Wanna come hang out with me? — with a single-word answer. “No.” Willy is still MIA with his cracked-out Chrissy Parsons drama. And Char, of course, is busy bonding with Horatio the ficus. So I’m jumping off the wagon myself. With bells on. We’re only on our salads, but I pour myself another glass.

  “Oh, it’s only turkey gravy,” Peggy scoffs as she picks up the bowl and lets a greasy rivulet stream all over her plate of California salad. I lovingly plucked that organic spinach from the plastic carton. Lovingly rinsed and sliced the organic strawberries and toasted the slivered almonds. Lovingly dotted it with bits of artisanal goat cheese that Peggy picked out with her fingers and dumped back in the main bowl because it was “one of them hippy cheeses” that is not fit for the turkey gravy she’s dribbling over top of hers.

  “Besides, if Missy Charlotte wants to have a say in how this baby is raised, she best smarten up,” Peg says, as if medication-resistant postpartum psychosis is just another dumb choice.

  “I’d like to know how you ended up with that baby,” I say, even though I could probably make a pretty good guess at the answer.

  Mama shoots me a dirty look. But Peggy seems pleased to tell me her version of the story. Turns out that Freddy and Dar, Char’s parents, did not just kick her out because she showed up with what Freddy called a “Halfrican baby.” They disowned her a few months ago when they found out she stole their credit cards and racked up enough debt to force them into bankruptcy, which cost them their cozy bungalow Down North. Freddy and Dar are now in a bachelor apartment in The Mines, living off canned beans and fried baloney. This was certainly not what they bargained for when they adopted her as a sparky, smiley, ginger-haired toddler. Now they don’t want her anywhere near them, lest she do them more damage.

  But there’s more that Peggy doesn’t say. History. Dar MacIsaac used to be Peggy’s best friend because Peggy’s ex-husband Skroink was best friends with Freddy MacIsaac growing up. And because they were both nosy big-mouthed bingo bags who grew up in The Mines, Peggy and Dar got along like two old birds. But then Peggy and Skroink split up and Dar told everyone that it was because Peggy was fooling around with Skroink’s cousin Bonk. So it stands to reason that Peggy has been hankering to get a good solid dig in at Dar ever since. Char showing up with a baby and a ready-made sob story about how her racist parents put her out on the street? Peggy Fortune to the rescue. Now she doesn’t actually have to deal with Char and still gets to parade around with the grandbaby that Dar and Freddy are too small-minded and petty to accept.

  Mama puts a plate of turkey and a bowl of potatoes on the table.

  “Jesus, Mossy. Don’t sit there waitin’ for me to wait on ya. Get yourself a plate,” Mama says at about five times her normal volume and a third of her regular speed. Uncle Mossy smiles like the intellectual invalid he’s always been assumed to be, and nods without making eye contact.

  “Don’t tell me he’s deaf,” Mama says, grinning sideways. “Selective hearing, that one.”

  Uncle Mossy shovels some meat and potatoes onto the good Blue Willow china plate, and smiles like the clever little Jeezer Mama always insisted he was.

  Mama sits down, and in between bites comes the kind of familiarly awkward and awkwardly familiar conversation that makes me want to jump out of my skin and run screaming into the night. Or get good and goddamn drunk, at least.

  “Willy Gimp’s not around much lately. Were you two going steady or wha?” Mama says.

  “Effie, nobody goes steady anymore.” Peggy flutters her fat eyelids like she knows what she’s talking about.

  “Or going together or dating or whatever. You know what I mean,” Mama says, waving the gravy boat around recklessly.

  “They don’t even do that these days. It’s all with the hookin’ up now. Right, Crow?”

  I take a long, slow, convenient sip of wine.

  “Hooking up? Like what hookers do?” Mama says.

  “Oh, nobody gets any money for it,” Peggy says with know-it-all bluster. “They give it away free. Girls these days. Casting pearls before swine.”

  “Well I hope they’re using French safes,” Mama whispers the last two words.

  “Have to staple them to them girls’ panties nowadays. If they even wear panties anymore,” Peggy says. “Oh, Effie, is this turkey ever moist!”

  If Uncle Mossy isn’t really deaf, I bet he wishes to hell he was now. Maybe Uncle Ernie had it right back at Christmas Eve dinner, circa 1991. Maybe a fork in the eye is an absolutely legitimate response to our family dinners. But I stick with just getting wasted. Another filled glass.

  “You’d eat shit on a shingle so long as it’s salty,” Mama’s voice rises. “Peggy never met a meal she didn’t like, eh, Mossy?”

  “The other one over there, too busy draining wine bottles to finish her hippy salad. Willy Gimp not in the picture now
, eh, Crow? He’s back with the Parsons one, trying to get her off the drugs for fear of Cracker. That baby be born drug-wrecked, ya think?”

  “You know . . .” I say, feeling saucy and sounding just a tad slurry. “That is none of my business. None of yours either, Peggy.”

  “I’d make it my business if I were you. I’d maybe lay off the booze too,” she says. Then she looks right at me, her eyes glinting with several shades of trouble-making. “Heard you went to visit Sarah Spenser’s a few weeks back.”

  “What? No. Where’d you hear that?” I sputter, amazed at how fast the instinct to lie like a busted seventeen-year-old comes roaring back.

  “Tell the truth, and shame the Devil,” she says.

  “You calling me a liar?” I snap.

  “No, but you are lying. There’s a difference. And see, me, eh? I can smell a lie a mile away.”

  “Whatever. I had some time to kill so I went there. To introduce myself.”

  “To who? Sarah Spenser?” Mama says flatly.

  “Yeah. Right after Rosalind died.”

  “There’s nothing to be gained there, Crow. Unless you are looking to start trouble with them after all these years.” Peggy cocks her head to the side so that her fleshy freckled jowls shift in an avalanche of ugly.

  “Peggy’s right. You’ll get no love from the Spensers. You’d be lucky to get the time of day,” Mama says.

  “I’m not after love. I just wanted some . . . perspective.”

  “Any perspective those people have is warped all to hell,” Mama says. “They don’t know their heads from their holes. Never did.”

  “Yeah, well I just got a little tired of only ever hearing one side of the story.” My throat is squeezing and squirming, yet failing to constrict the emerging emotion. “Is it that unreasonable to want to know that side of my family before I —”

  “Don’t mistake your relations for your family,” Mama says. “There’s a difference.”

  “I’m just saying, I don’t have much time so —”

  “Oh, knock off the terminally ill bit.” Peggy flashes a gum-toothed smile at me. “Your mother said the biopsy wasn’t as bad as they thought, so there’s no need for the ‘Oh, I might die any minute’ nonsense. You’ll probably outlive us all.”

  Uncle Mossy just sits there, carefully plowing his mashed potatoes around his plate with the edge of his fork, not a care in the world. Daktari is slumped against Peggy’s heaving, misshapen bosom, in a peaceful gravy-induced coma. But I can feel myself lighting up with some good old Christmas Eve Fortune Family Fight fury.

  “Yeah, Peggy, I’m just being melodramatic, eh. What am I getting all bent out of shape for? The attention, probably.” I take another swig of fuel. “I just need to smarten up. Right?” I fix a narrowed gaze on Peggy, tenting my fingers into a steeple, elbows planted on the table, leaning in like I mean business.

  “Get your elbows off the table and stop staring your aunt down like a hooligan, missy. It’s Christmas,” Mama says.

  I straighten up, pick up my wine glass, swirl the red nectar around, and knock back the rest of the glass. I fold my arms across my chest, lean back, and wait for someone to say something.

  Peggy does not disappoint, even though her mouth is still half-crammed with potatoes.

  “So what’d Sarah Spenser have to say?”

  “Peggy, drop it,” Mama says.

  “You really wanna know?” But first I grab the wine bottle and watch as the red liquid trickles into the contours of my glass with a slow, controlled pour. “We had tea. She said that if I wanted to know what really happened to my father, maybe I should be grilling you two.” I steadily increase the flow of wine from bottle to glass.

  “Horseshit. How about passing me the gravy, Mossy. Anybody else find this turkey dry?” Mama says, her underbite jutting out, teeth pinching and scraping her top lip as she waits for Moss to steer the gravy boat toward her.

  Peggy is uncharacteristically quiet, and has developed an unusual interest in rearranging the food on her plate. I stare at her, waiting, trying to figure out which of my buttons she’ll try to push next. But I’m caught off guard when the air around her suddenly solidifies into thick bands of navy, dusty rose, and muted green. The colours seem like they’re pressing down hard on her shoulders, making her slump more than usual. Like they’re trying to push something out of her.

  “Peggy, hand me the salt,” Mama says, thunking the gravy boat down on the table. “I forgot to salt the water for these carrots.”

  I’m so mesmerized by the colours invading the space around Peggy that I fail to notice the wine kissing the edge of my glass. I stop pouring a millisecond after it starts to spill. I hunch over with pursed lips and slurp from the overflowing glass. Mama clears her throat, and looks around the table for the salt that hasn’t arrived. Then, through the tension and the wine and the wobbling world of hallucinations, it hits me like a ton of technicolour bricks: Peggy knows something. And there are not enough sane, sober brain cells in my head to stop what comes out of my mouth, even as I sense Mama silently pleading with me to shut up.

  “You know something.” The heavy bands of colours shudder and shake, but my eyes stay locked on Peggy because now I know something. Those colours are a fortress of secrets built up around her, and I can see it starting to crumble like an old wall. If she tries to deny it, she’ll probably pass out from the stifling shit stink of her own lies. And she knows that, too.

  Peggy pulls her head up, her jowls quivering, eyes and nostrils flaring. She starts to speak but Mama cuts her off.

  “Stacey Theresa Fortune, shuddup and eat your supper. Look, you’re spilling wine all over hell and creation.”

  “No, Effie, I’m gonna —” Peggy starts.

  “You aren’t gonna nothin’. Shut up and eat your supper. Both of you.”

  “Mama, I deserve —”

  “You deserve what? The right to wreck our last . . .” She stands up and grabs the salt shaker from its hiding place, six inches from Mossy’s untouched wine glass.

  “She deserves to know the truth, Effie,” Peg says, an acidic undertone ebbing beneath the veneer of sincerity. The wall has not crumbled that much.

  “Spit it out, Peggy. Just tell the truth and shame the Devil yourself for once!” I only realize that I’m almost yelling when Daktari starts to fuss.

  “The truth, eh?” Peggy says softly, gently jiggling the kid back to sleep. “Maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  Little shards of her crumbling wall of colours fly around her head like antagonizing shrapnel. I wince. I don’t have to take this. My voice is sharp, and tinged with rage. “Just tell me what the ever-lovin’ fuck —”

  “E-nough.” Mama punctuates the word with a loud thump of her heavy hand on the table. “The next person who makes so much as a snide peep is getting grabbed by the scruff of the neck and biffed in a snowbank. Got that?”

  Uncle Mossy looks dumbly up from his plate, puts down his fork, sniffs his shirt sleeve, and grins like a nut.

  “Peep,” he whispers.

  Mama swats him upside the head as she picks up his plate before he gets a chance to lick it clean like he usually does, and she marches to the sink.

  “Who wants pie?” she barks.

  Not me. My head is spinning like a top, but it still tips back effortlessly as I pour the last of the wine down my throat. I make a point of setting the glass down with more than a gentle clink. I shove my chair back and sashay to the living room. And by sashay I mean stagger.

  I hear Peggy scoff, “Look at the other one. Drunk as a skunk.”

  I’m just about to yell at her to go fuck herself when the world turns into a tilt-a-whirl. I close my eyes. The smell of cat-piss spruce tree swallows me, a million needles bury themselves in my skin, and my whole body is gripped by a heavy, claustrophobic panic. There’s a musical clatter of glass, a chorus of voices, and the steady drumming of footsteps down the hall. I open my eyes. All I can see is tree. And the
brownish orange fibre of the living-room carpet. Torn wrapping paper on the pile of presents, all of which are for me. Because I was too broke, too sick, too full of excuses to get anyone anything. And then there’s that damn Dough Baby lying on the floor in front of me, its head cracked in two.

  Mama resurrects the sideways tree. Uncle Mossy tugs at my arm until I’m sitting more or less upright, and starts picking up the hunks of shattered glass around me. Peggy stands at the living room entrance with Char’s baby on her hip, pretending to stifle her laughter as it quakes through her body. And before it completely subsides, she starts belting out her own favourite John Denver classic, “Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas),” replacing Daddy with Stacey.

  “Shut the fuck up!” I hear myself slur. “How do you know I didn’t have a seizure?”

  “Seizure, my arse,” Peggy says. “You’re piss loaded and ya fell in the tree. Just like the Old Man. What did I always say, Black Bernie Fortune will never die as long as that one’s alive. Although I hear the Spensers were a bit of a wreck when they got on the booze, too.”

  “Are you gonna let her talk to me like that?” I say, lolling my head around to look at Mama. But Mama’s not listening. She’s sitting in the rocking chair, cradling the pieces of Dough Baby in her hard, heavy hands, not even trying to conceal the tears racing down her cheeks.

  “Ma, I’m sorry. I lost my balance —”

  “Go to bed, Crow,” Mama says, her eyes fixed on the broken ornament.

  “Effie, I —” Peggy starts.

  “Go have your pie. Go home as soon as you’re done.”

  And that is how I wrecked Christmas Eve. But Allie Walker managed to one-up me.

  6 BLOOD AND WATER

  One of the reasons Allie Walker did not die in the grungy bathroom of her father’s house on Christmas Eve night is that her kid brother, Lennon, is a demanding, impatient little tool. Despite agitated huffing and puffing about how he needed to fix his hair before his girlfriend arrived, Allie still wasn’t getting out of the bathroom fast enough. Lennon booted the door open. He found Allie in an empty bathtub, fully dressed, semi-conscious, with a broken Daisy razor beside her and an empty pill bottle in hand. The other reason that Allie Walker did not die in the grungy bathroom of her father’s house on Christmas Eve night is that the bathroom wasn’t even grungy. She scrubbed every inch of it with a toothbrush before dumping a mittful of Ativan down her throat, and trying to smash the blade out of a pretty pink razor.