Crow

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Crow Page 22

by Amy Spurway


  “And believe you me, I’ll see if you’re faking it,” I warn.

  When they come back an hour later — eyes red from toking and crying, hair mussed up from both hugs and hollers, bodies soft from the release of tensions and secrets, big and small — there’s been another shift that only my eyes can see. Streaks of the same violet that have been popping up from Char’s new-found ground now dance and smear around the periphery of Allie’s freshly brightened blues. And they both have the faintest flicker of a warm, golden fuzz in the centre of their chests.

  “That one’s still a grubby skank.” Allie shrugs at me. “And I can’t believe she’s your cousin.”

  “Fuck you, Walker, ya melon-dramatic ice queen,” Char drawls, thumping Allie’s cheek with the most wayward dreadlock on her head.

  “Shut up the two of you and give me some love.” I waddle toward their glowy hearts and open arms. I pinch Allie’s arse and wipe my snot- and tear-streaked face on Char’s bare shoulder just to be a dick and remind them who is in charge of holding this world together, for now. I whisper, “Wait’ll you hear what me and Wendy cooked up for Mama’s proper memorial.”

  Look, there goes Crow again, causing a scene. Making some big dog and pony show out of me dying.

  It’s still jarring to have Mama’s voice be the first thing I hear every morning when I wake up. Over the sound of Willy snoring beside me, over the racket of caws and screeches from the birds in the trees out back, over the symptomatic song of the Tumourific Trio that still pounds in my ears before my head leaves the pillow.

  G’wan, Mama. There won’t be any dogs or ponies there. No cat-piss lilies or drunken family brawls either. Just tea and squares and stories from all the people who love you and miss you. There’s also a big bowl of rum punch, two pans of broc-o-glop, and a chance of an old country song sing-along before the evening’s out. After the punch is gone.

  The girls from the Greeting Gale went and Javexed the bejesus out of the whole fire hall, and every old scratch on the road is hauling out their potluck best. The ladies’ auxiliary pulled together some raffle baskets featuring a weekend at the Gale, snow clearing from the Alwards, an oil change from Willy’s garage, and a hat and mitt set from Mama’s friend, Betty Who Knits. The money raised from the tickets will be donated to the various people and places Mama always made time to help out.

  On the morning of Mama’s Mother’s Day Memorial Celebration, I drink my tea and watch the sun chase away every remnant of lazy fog, giving way to an endless umbrella of azure and light, and I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Because I realize that I’m not alone. In my grief. In my home. Even in my body. And my family isn’t the pack of cursed pariahs I’d always assumed. The Fortunes use what they’ve got to do what they can, even if all they’ve got is a sizable mess or a dose of madness.

  Then, looking out into my yard at the plant life that seems to have gone into overdrive overnight, I am struck by perhaps the most humbling, profound realization of all. The bag of shrivelled old mystery bulbs I rescued from beneath Mama’s paper pile and planted back in the fall? The ones that I imagined would dapple the grass with bright beauty and provide a source of free Mother’s Day flowers that I would childishly pluck and present to Mama today? I didn’t know if the things I planted would grow, but lo and behold, they did. Onions. They are all goddamn onions.

  […]

  There are too many people piled into the ramshackle rural fire hall to count, but I make a point of trying to shake the hand of every last one of them. Between sips of tea and rum punch and nibbles of squares and broc-o-glop, each has a story to tell about Mama. Stories I’d never heard. Like the time a Halfway Road stray cat named Dan Richard got its head stuck in a mayonnaise jar after little Effie Fortune gave it a whisker trim at her stray cat salon. Or the time that fifteen-year-old Effie clocked the pervy old priest who felt up her friend Wanda’s arse after midnight Mass. Or the time she spent five hours straight at the bedside of a woman who’d been in a bad car wreck, absorbing her pain until the surgeon and anesthesiologist got there, even though it meant missing her own daughter’s graduation. Wendy, God love her, trails behind me as I work the room, taking notes so that there’ll be a written record of the stories people tell. For posterity. For celebration. For her grandchild, someday. Effie Fortune was full of surprises, even after she died.

  I’m having such a time that I scarcely notice Willy when he shuffles up beside me, wearing a charcoal suit and a shit-eating grin. He grabs my hand, pulls me close, and whispers in my ear, “Turn around, ya goof.”

  I turn around and see the fire hall’s prize possession — a forty-eight-inch wall-mounted flat screen TV — flicker to life as The Doors’ “Hello, I Love You” struts out from the speaker. Pictures of me begin flashing across the screen. Me as an egg-headed newborn. Me, cake-faced on my first birthday. Me, beaming in my red velvet dress at the Christmas concert in grade three. Me and Mama at the beach, taken by Grubby Alward on his mother’s stolen Polaroid. Me, Allie, and Char on the way to a high school dance. Me and Willy, shooting the shit down at the smoking grounds when we should have been in chemistry. My university graduation photo. The uber-serious professional headshot I had taken for the Viva Rica website just last year. And a selfie of me and Willy in the cab en route to the hotel, all birthday grinch-eyed and grinny, on the night that I got pregnant. As Jim Morrison wails out his final orgasmic hellos, the picture dissolves into words: “Crow Fortune, will you marry me?”

  Willy’s grin gives way to a nervous laugh as he flips open a small black box to reveal the biggest, gaudiest glittering rock I’ve ever seen in my life.

  “It’s not made of corpse ashes. But she’s still a doozie, wha?”

  And then, there’s a sharp cracking noise and a blinding flash at the door.

  Char, engulfed in a flare of searing red brilliance, is making the final few paces of a mad dash toward the man who just walked in. She hauls off and clocks him, sending a flurry of silvery blue sparks flying from the side of his shaved head.

  “Christ Almighty, Charlotte!” Peggy wheezes as she bustles over to stop her wild child from taking another swing at the guy. He straightens himself up, smiling as his fingers pat the faint fleck of blood seeping from the spot where Char’s fist met his mouth. He nods benevolently, assuring everyone he’s fine as he smooths the front of his burgundy robe and scans the crowd with his cool, clear, azure eyes.

  And then, through the rising tide of whispers and murmurs and curious colours, I hear Peggy gasp.

  “Dear God! Alec?”

  It’s all I can do not to vomit on the shoulder of poor old Mr. Patterson’s tweed sports jacket. In the commotion that follows, I almost forget to tell Willy that my answer to his proposal is a resounding maybe.

  […]

  Some people escape the trappings of ordinary life or extraordinary pressure by slipping into shadows and dissolving into darkness. Others hide in plain sight. Over the last thirty-some years, Smart Alec Spenser Brother Gyaltso Hottie McMonk Pants did both.

  On that October night in 1976, when Alec Spenser took to the water aboard The Anastasia, he figured everybody would think he was dead. Especially after he dropped his beer, gashed his hand picking up the broken glass, and left behind a blood splattered T-shirt. He knew he was leaving a wave of stories and suspicions in his wake. He knew that rumours would swirl in vicious circles for years, both from and about everyone in his life. He thought about his girlfriend, their unborn baby, and the big crazy cursed family she came from. He thought about his pompous old man, his cold mother, and his jealous sister. Then, he motored his little fishing boat down the coast as far as he could. Just before dawn, he ran The Anastasia aground and let her sink. He thumbed his way down into the States, where he hooked up with a bunch of glassy-eyed hippies on their way to a Buddhist shindig in Colorado. Six years later, Smart Alec Spenser was a brand new man named Brother Sharchen Gyaltso, who’d successfully transformed his personal hardships into spiritual treasure.
Meanwhile, back on Cape Breton Island, Scruffy Effie Fortune was doing her damnedest to be mother and father to a little girl they’d just begun to call Crow.

  While I was eighteen, loudly squawking about how stupid and confining this place was, desperate to spread my wings and fly away from this godforsaken island, Brother Gyaltso was making his way Down North, up into the highlands to run the small monastery overlooking the wild and spacious ocean. While I spent years flailing, trying to cleanse or drown myself in a sea of urban anonymity, Brother Gyaltso sat motionless on a cushion, staring out a massive window, watching the crows leap from cliff edges to play in the open air. And while I stood on the wharf, scattering Mama’s ashes on the waves of the Bras d’Or, Brother Gyaltso was on the crowd’s edge, preparing for the inevitable time when worlds and truths collide. Knowing that he’d have to emerge from the safety of his fake death’s shadow, even if it meant taking a puck in the mouth. Which it did.

  Charlotte knew who he was when he walked through that door before anyone else did. Bruce the Spruce whispered to her earlier that day. Something about righteous rage and sins of the father. See, Smart Alec Spenser made a few dumb moves. He went and knocked up Peggy Fortune, too.

  […]

  “Well isn’t this cute,” I sneer at the two of them as they sit side by side at my kitchen table, as if time and space don’t retain the sores and cracks of betrayal. Mama’s not here to take them to task for their treachery, but I am. And if there’s one thing I know how to do, it is hold a grudge, by Jesus.

  “Crow, it’s not how you think.” Peggy’s voice sways with a blunt edge of defensiveness. “Put on the tea and we’ll talk.”

  “Did Mama know?” My lips purse into an O-shape, my eyes narrow. Because despite my new-found benevolence, I don’t serve tea to backstabbing bastards.

  “Just put the tea on and we’ll talk,” Peggy pleads.

  “I want an answer.”

  “Put the tea on.”

  “Tea’s made. Because my mother raised me right. ‘Keep the tea on, and don’t be a man-thieving trollop.’ Pretty sure that’s a direct quote from her.” I cross my arms atop my blooming belly and cock my widened hips to one side.

  Peggy smiles. I’m gripped by the urge to wipe that antagonistic grin right off her face, but no sooner does the bear hug of rage grip my chest, than a gentle ebb of fuzzy mauves and warm yellows materialize around Peggy. Easy there, Jumpy McConclusionson. There’s more to the story. I uncross my arms and un-cock my hips, freeing my belly from the prison of that posture, that habit. My smirk disintegrates.

  “Did Mama know about the two of you?” I soften the tone but not the insistence.

  Peggy and Gyaltso look at each other, then back at me. Their heads bob in slow unison.

  “She was the only one who knew I had his baby. There’s more, though,” Peggy says. “Is that tea good and strong?”

  When Peggy went to Smart Alec Spenser on that October night in 1976 with news of her own pregnancy, she’d already paid a visit to his father to tell him that Alec had knocked her up. Old John Alec knew how bad it would make his family look if people thought his son had two back-to-back bastard babies with two different Fortune sisters. So Peggy agreed to do what my mother would not. Quietly, gratefully, Peggy took the money that John Alec Spenser gave her to pay for her very own trip to the Montreal clinic. But she had a different plan in mind for herself and Smart Alec. They both had to disappear. She, until after that baby was born, and he, for good. It would be for the best.

  Because here’s the thing: even though everybody knew that Smart Alec Spenser was the father of Scruffy Effie Fortune’s baby, everybody was wrong. What everybody didn’t know was that Smart Alec Spenser and Scruffy Effie Fortune were never more than friends, and not the kind with bedroom benefits. Smart Alec Spenser took responsibility for Scruffy Effie Fortune’s pregnancy to protect her from shame and scandal. But when Smart Alec accidently fell in love with and knocked up Peggy, things stood to get complicated. So they decided to make it simple again. She went off to the Mainland and had the baby, and he just disappeared.

  “Your mother and Alec were never intimate.” Peggy gazes out the window, looking for something to make all of this less awkward. Probably wondering why there’s a ton of onions planted all over the yard.

  “Well, in the interest of right speech, there was that one time when Effie and I —”

  “Lord thundering Jesus, man, she doesn’t need details!” Peggy snaps her attention back to the robe-wrapped man. “Not right speech if it’s wrong-headed, now is it? The point is, Crow, Alec isn’t your father.”

  “Well then . . .” I trail off, distracted by the dance of tender reds and amber yellows that merge and mingle in figure eights around Peggy’s and Alec’s heads. I take a half-sip of my tea, which has grown lukewarm and too sweet since Peggy and Alec started telling their story.

  Peggy sighs, shifting her weight from one arse cheek to the other as she looks at me, then at Gyaltso. She gets all still, stony, and mountainous for a moment.

  “Your father was Old John Alec Spenser.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I thunk my head down on the table. “I don’t have time for a goddamn identity crisis.” Because at this stage in the game, it doesn’t matter who my father was. I’m Effie Fortune’s child, through and through.

  The exact nature of Scruffy Effie Fortune’s relationship with John Alexander Spenser is a detail that was scattered out on the wind and waves of the Bras d’Or along with her ashes. Despite decades of trying to sniff out the truth, the only thing Peggy could ever smell was her sister’s ability to keep her mouth shut. It smelled like concrete and camphor. Smart Alec Spenser suspected that his father had taken advantage of Effie after they hired her as the housekeeper. But Effie never let on about anything until the day she came to Alec, after having told the old man to go to hell with his abortion money. Smart Alec didn’t have to think twice. He got his father to agree to let Effie and her baby live in the trailer on this piece of land, and in return, Alec would be the public face of paternity for Effie Fortune’s baby. To save everyone a pile of grief.

  “Your mother was a wonderful woman,” Brother Gyaltso says solemnly.

  “And John Alec Spenser was a poor excuse for a man,” Peggy grunts. “Which is why Effie never let on it was him who got her pregnant, and why she kept Alec alive in your heart and mind your whole life. He was the father she wanted you to have. The father you deserved.”

  “The father who faked his own death, ran for the hills, and left my mother alone and pregnant.” I watch as the sharpness of the words, my tone, make a dent in Alec’s rusty red halo.

  “We were young. And stupid. Doing what we thought was best under the circumstances. Your mother wouldn’t want your pity, or any sourness toward Alec. Effie always lived on her own terms.” Peg’s chin drops to her chest as the wall that was her auric defence collapses around her in a cloud of shimmering blue and yellow dust. “And maybe she died on her own terms, too.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I watch. Wait. Peggy squints hard, but that only forces out further the tears she’s suddenly struggling to contain.

  “Maybe Effie was sick.” She straightens up, her eyes and her aura growing so wide and so open that for a moment I flinch, thinking they might have designs on swallowing me whole. “Sick with something real bad. Like cancer. All through her. Because her body held so many people’s pain, and couldn’t let it go. Maybe she didn’t bother going to the doctor because she knew it by feel. Maybe I could even smell it after a time. And maybe her accident . . . well maybe there are no accidents.”

  The swampy swirls of Peggy’s grief and relief and pride and shame pull me up and out of my chair. I wrap my arms around her in what would quite possibly meet the stringent qualifying criteria for the world’s most awkward hug. My body — strangely steady and numb in the wake of it all — can scarcely contain her sobs and quakes. But I hold onto her until the seismic jolts of shifting secrets
finally settle. Until Cletus the Fetus boots me in the bladder and I damn near piss myself.

  “It is such an honour to witness this and to serve as a catalyst for a deepening relationship —”

  “Oh spare me the holy Buddhist tripe, Alec,” Peggy snaps. “You’re a grandfather now, by the way. That child needs milk and diapers and proper hair care for that little red nappy head of his. And our daughter will live her whole life on the brink of cracking up because she’s got ways that the world has yet to understand. So drop the ragamuffin-monk-on-the-mountain shtick. Mark my words, Saint Sarah is up to something with Spenser Mining. I smelled it myself. Sulphur and pork fat. You want to be of use here? Pry your share of the family money out of her bony little hands before she drives it all into the ground.”

  “My vows compel me to renounce the pursuit of material possessions,” Gyaltso begins, each word imbued with an air of pious, methodical serenity.

  But Peggy’s neck is craned and her nose is wrinkled, as she interrupts with a loud sniff. Sniff. Sniff. “Bullshit and bubble gum,” she says, tapping the side of her right nostril with her thick finger. “You’re up to something, too. A wolf in monk’s clothing, Alec.” She pauses, drawing in another whiff of something that sends angry little flints of blackened red flying around her. “I’m gonna make a few wild guesses here, Alec, just from the smell of you. Tell me I’m wrong, I dare ya.” Peggy leans across the table toward him, eyes fixed, face unflinching. “Sarah already knows you’re alive, don’t she? You came out of the damn woods when you heard this property was up for sale and tried to get her to give it to you, but she said no. You’ve got some little pet project on the go and you need help. That’s why you showed up at Effie’s memorial. To see if you could tap into the love for Effie here, and turn that love into money somehow. You’re as bad as the rest of them.”

 

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