It was clear the mill worker hoped the conversation was over but the old man continued. “All I’m sayin’ is they won’t rebuild. Whatever the company tells you is bullshit. This whole thing is bullshit. It stinks. But no one’s talking about that, are they?”
Elena’s eyes widened. She wanted to ask the old man what he meant, but the mill worker raised his voice. “I’m here with my kids, as you can see. Why don’t you keep your opinions to yourself?”
“Just trying to give you some friendly advice.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ken banged a cup on the counter and squared his shoulders. He was much bigger than the other men.
“It’s alright, Ken. We’re leaving anyway.” The old men got up and scraped their chairs back from the table. Elena desperately wanted to follow them and enquire about their suspicions but she could see that it was not a good time to ask questions.
Mary came in as the two old guys left. Elena could tell she’d picked up on something by the way her gaze drifted casually from the old men to the mill worker. But Mary didn’t deviate from her routine; she dropped money on the table and Ken brought her a coffee. She pulled open her newspaper and began examining it. Elena brought her hot chocolate over to Mary’s table, sat down on the chair next to Mary and stared at her until she put the paper down.
“We’re not leaving town,” Elena said. “They’re going to rebuild the sawmill.”
“Things change, Elena.”
She glared at Mary. She was supposed to be on her side. Mary shuffled her paper.
“Why did they send the army in?”
Mary shrugged. “All I know about the military is that they don’t answer to you and me.”
Ken reappeared with Mary’s change. He didn’t look at Elena.
“Ken lied about ...”
“... Didn’t your mom tell you to behave?” he said.
Ken never spoke to her like that. Even Mary looked surprised. He cleared his throat quietly as if his words had just been part of regular conversation. He retreated behind the counter, his barricade. With a snap of her newspaper, Mary put hers up, too. Elena was shut out.
In a bit, Ken came back, this time with two cinnamon buns. “On the house,” he said. Elena loved cinnamon buns. Mary eyed her bun but didn’t touch it.
“What do you want?” she asked cautiously.
Ken laughed uncomfortably. “Elena’s been stuck inside all morning. If you have time, maybe the two of you could go for a short walk.”
Elena looked at Mary excitedly. She knew Ken was trying to get rid of her, but she didn’t mind. She didn’t want to be around him either, not now that he was on her list, along with Frank, of people who could no longer be trusted.
“Where do you want to go then?” Mary asked. “The park?”
Elena shook her head. “The park’s boring. I go there all the time.” She thought about it. “Did you live in Stapleton as a kid?”
“Yeah.”
“I want to see where you lived.”
“Alright then. But it’s too far to walk.” Mary folded her paper and got up. Ken boxed the buns and a few minutes later Mary was driving the two of them out of town along a bumpy forestry road. Her old car jolted violently, sending crumbs flying from Elena’s sticky bun. With every bump she felt a little more nauseous. As they climbed, more and more trees crowded the sagebrush until the forest was a wall of green.
Not far from town, they pulled in hard against a grassy verge. It didn’t seem like the kind of place kids grew up. No homes or cars or basketball hoops in driveways. Maybe Mary had forgotten where she lived. That happened to people when they got older, but Elena wasn’t sure Mary had lived quite long enough for her memories to get jumbled up.
Mary turned the engine off but didn’t move. Elena un-clipped her seatbelt and waited. “I’ve never brought anyone here before,” Mary mumbled as she stared out of the window.
Elena followed Mary through the pine trees into a clearing taken up mostly by tall grass and clusters of sagebrush. Mary hovered over the charred stumps of a building frame.
“What is this place?”
“The Deer Creek Camp.”
“What kind of camp was it?” Elena asked. There were no spots to pitch tents. She couldn’t see any fire pits or swimming holes or a place to pay fees and pick up firewood.
“It was a prison kinda camp.”
Elena found the two words difficult to put together in her head. “What’s a prison camp?”
“It’s a place to put people you don’t like without having to go to the expense of building an actual building to house them.”
“So the tents were like jail cells and no one could leave their tent?”
“We didn’t have tents. We had huts and we could leave our huts. But we couldn’t leave the camp without special permission.”
We, we, we. Elena had to process it for a moment before she spoke. “They put you in the prison camp?”
Before Mary could answer, Elena had to ask another question. “Did you do something bad?”
“No worse than what you get up to. I was four years old when they brought me and my parents here. My parents were farmers who kept to themselves mostly, but we were Canadians with Japanese ancestors, and there was a war on. The Japanese were the enemy. The government decided we were a danger to society. So they took our home and everything we owned and sent us here.”
Elena couldn’t make sense of it, and Mary appeared to have said all she wanted to say, so Elena stayed quiet. She knew there were two of them, world wars, and people from Stapleton who died in them had their names written on a big piece of rock in front of the Village Hall and they put a wreath in front of it on Remembrance Day and old people showed up wearing colourful medals.
The sky clouded over and the wind tugged at the sagebrush and the prickly grasses. Miss Meyer had said sagebrush was a healing plant. She’d brought bound sprigs into the classroom that her students passed around and put to their noses to smell the outdoors inside. Then she announced that Logan and his stepbrother Taylor had switched schools and their family was moving to Stony Creek.
Elena ran to his house after school and tried to say goodbye. She knocked on the door a few times but no one answered. She wanted to know if Logan was still angry with her for the cemetery trip and if he blamed her for what happened to his dad. Maybe he didn’t think it was all just a coincidence. Maybe he still believed in the curse. It was too late to find out. There was no longer a sticker on the upstairs window. The blinds were drawn downstairs but she could see bare walls through the cracks. He had already gone.
Elena stooped down and pulled at a piece of sage. She inhaled the sweetness that stuck to her fingers. “Sagebrush has a taproot,” she found herself telling Mary. “That’s how it gets water when it doesn’t rain for a long time. The taproot goes deep down to the water underground. Miss Meyer says Stapleton is like the sagebrush. Things have changed so we have to adapt.”
Mary let out a peculiar sound, a strangled laugh, the kind that meant it wasn’t funny.
“Stapleton is going to grow a taproot, is it? Is that what your teacher told you?”
Elena went quiet. She didn’t want to hear any more about what Mary thought. This was her home. It would get better again. It had to.
She circled the scorched wood and then poked it so that it powdered the tips of her fingers black. There had been a fire here, probably a big one, a long time ago. Fire seemed to destroy everything in Stapleton sooner or later.
Elena scuffed her shoes against the dirt as she explored the clearing. Leaves were coming off the aspens by the creek. The water was shallow; the banks were too big for the thin stream that burbled over the stones. A rotten board had sunk into the side of one bank, wedged in by larger stones. She pulled it out of the stream. It was long enough to make a bridge over the creek, but she wasn’t strong enough to manoeuvre it across to the other side. She latched onto one end of the board and dragged it int
o the clearing, stumbling over the rough tangle of shrubs and roots. Mud stains marked her t-shirt and the bottoms of her jeans. She looked up at Mary guiltily. It was now Mary’s job to look after her, and Mamma would surely have something to say about the state of her clothes. But Mary didn’t seem to care. She watched as Elena leaned the board against the cremated remains of a shelter.
“We used to play in that creek.” Mary’s voice was quiet, as though she was speaking to herself. Elena wiped the creek dirt from her hands onto her jeans. If Mary didn’t care, she wasn’t going to.
“I was younger than you then. Skinny as a whip.”
It was hard to imagine Mary young and thin, splashing in streams. Elena teetered along old scars underfoot; a rotting wooden frame hidden beneath the sagebrush. She scuffled around in the undergrowth looking for more clues. Maybe a rescued picture frame, a pair of old-fashioned spectacles or those funny metal baths people used to wash in.
She didn’t find anything but she could imagine the place as Mary described it. Rows of makeshift huts and in one was a little schoolhouse. That came later, Mary explained. For a while they didn’t go to school at all. The huts didn’t have toilets; they had to use the communal outhouses which stank. Mary was afraid to go in them at night, especially in the winter when they had to trudge through snow to reach them.
Though the day was dull, the earth was still warm and when Elena took Mary’s hand she felt that warmth flowing through her. Mary looked surprised, but Elena didn’t let go. She led Mary to the creek, to the place she said she used to play. They didn’t go too close. Mary couldn’t manage the slippery rocks anymore, but Elena knew she could hear the water washing the stones because a smile slipped over her lips. Fragments of dazzling light bounced off the shifting surface.
“Did you have friends at the camp?”
Mary didn’t answer at first and Elena thought maybe she wouldn’t, but then she said: “I had a friend named Kazuko. She was like a big sister. She was a year older than me. Our families lived in the same hut.”
Elena wanted to know what Mary and Kazuko’s hut looked like exactly, and if they got to bring anything with them, and if they had their own bedrooms, but Mary was already talking about another place.
“Before the war, we had a farm in the Lower Mainland. I loved it there. I always thought we’d go back. We never did.”
“I’d like to live on a farm.”
Elena wouldn’t exchange her own home though. She’d rather stay exactly where she was than live anywhere else. She hadn’t been to a lot of places, but she was pretty sure there wasn’t anywhere else better to live. Rob thought Stapleton was boring, but he thought everything was boring except basketball and computer games and his girlfriend.
“Did Kazuko live on a farm too?”
“No. Her family came from Ucluelet. That’s about as far west as you can be and still be in Canada,” Mary explained. “Kazuko used to say her dad could see all the way to Japan from his fishing boat.”
“Could he?” Elena asked curiously.
“No.”
Elena thought about how intensely Mamma could look at a single photograph from her cluttered box of Italian mementoes. “Places don’t leave you,” she’d said once when Elena had asked her about it. They weren’t going to leave Stapleton. Dad was coming home. The mill would be rebuilt.
Mary told Elena how cold it used to get in the winter. They weren’t used to it, coming from the Lower Mainland where there wasn’t much snow, and the shacks weren’t built for keeping the cold out. Her back drooped as she sank deeper into her memories.
“My dad left us for a while in the beginning. He was taken to a different camp. But he came back. Kazuko’s dad was sent east. They didn’t see him for years.”
“Because of the war?” Elena asked. Mary seemed not to hear her as she carefully navigated the rough ground.
It was hard not to think about Dad. When her heart hurt so much that she felt sick, she reminded herself that he would come home. Maybe it had been the same for Mary and Kazuko.
Mary tried to show Elena where their shack had stood, though she couldn’t be sure of the exact location. It looked so different back then, she said. Elena examined the evidence beneath her feet, but there was only earth. She pulled a stick from the ground, the perfect height for a walking stick, and she used it to poke between the shrubs.
Mary checked her watch. “It’s time we got back.”
Elena wanted to stay longer, but she wouldn’t argue with Mary. She trailed her across the clearing towards the road.
“Why did everyone leave the camp?” Elena asked.
“The war ended. Kazuko and her family went to join her dad in Ontario. None of us got our homes back so people dispersed across the country. But our family didn’t have to go far. My dad found a job at a local ranch. He was a hard worker and he knew about farming. The rancher had a trailer on his property and we lived there for a while.”
“My dad’s coming home soon. He’ll find another job too. We won’t have to leave Stapleton either. We like it here.”
Mary was quiet. Elena drew her stick against the spiny pads of a little prickly pear cactus, pretending not to care about Mary’s response, which didn’t come.
“Why does everything burn down?” Elena asked.
“It’s nature’s way of getting rid of the old wood. Fire makes way for new life.” Mary interrupted her own thought. “I don’t mean the mill. When there are people involved it’s different, but in nature, that’s what fire does. It cleans house.”
Elena liked that idea. Fire wasn’t always bad. Fire could clean things. Mary seemed to know a lot about a lot of things. Elena decided to tell her how she’d found Dad’s truck and then spotted Frank nearby. Maybe Mary could explain what Frank was doing out there on a lonely backroad.
“No one believes me because Frank said it wasn’t him but I know it was.”
Elena examined Mary’s expression to try and figure out if she believed her. Mary didn’t seem surprised by what Elena said, but then Mary never did. Whatever she was thinking, she was keeping it to herself.
They were interrupted by a crack in the trees. A figure moving through the bush a short distance away. Mary grabbed her hand.
“Let’s go.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then why do we have to leave?”
“Because I don’t know who it is and we’re out here on our own.”
Elena didn’t know why they had to be scared of one other person, but Mary was insistent. She kept a tight hold of Elena’s arm all the way back to the car.
When they got to the road, Mary yanked Elena’s hand. There was a man in black pants and bomber jacket leaning against Mary’s car, casually, like it was normal for him to be there, out on the forestry road alone.
“Stay close to me,” Mary whispered.
This man was young with hair that was almost curly and almost red, eyes almost blue, almost green. He didn’t smile. His face was blank, just like Mary’s. Two hard-edged people staring each other down, waiting for one to crack.
“Are you aware this is private property?” He spoke slowly, deliberately, as if each syllable was a big effort.
“Is it? Where’s the sign?”
His stare got meaner. “What exactly are you doing out here?”
“We’re getting some fresh air. Who are you?”
“I work for a private security firm. It’s my job to keep out trespassers.”
“Maybe your employers should invest in a big fence and some signs. Like they used to have up here.”
“So you do know this is private property?”
The two of them glared at each other, Elena wondering who would break their gaze first. The man bent down in front of Elena; his breath on her face.
“Do you come up here often for fresh air?”
Elena was too afraid to answer. She looked at Mary and decided to imitate her. She gave the man the coldest stare she could.
He got up slowly. “Don’t come back.”
Mary pulled Elena’s hand and they walked towards the car. Elena thought about turning around but Mary yanked her arm again and they hurried as quickly as Mary could hurry to her vehicle. As soon as they opened the doors and got in, Elena looked back to where the man had been standing, but he wasn’t there anymore. Mary had noticed too.
“Where the hell did he go?” she muttered under her breath.
Mary started the engine. She spun the car around and they bounced over the potholes back down the logging road. Her eyes kept flitting back and forth between the road and the rear-view mirror. Elena spun around in her seat, half expecting to see a black sedan with tinted windows speeding towards them, the kind she’d seen hurtling through Mamma’s cop shows, but they were the only vehicle on the road. Mary clunked into a different gear and Elena scanned the trees for signs of people. Neither of them spoke for a minute.
“He’s part of the curse.”
“No, Elena.”
“He could be. That’s how he just appeared and disappeared.”
Elena sat back and thought about it. The trees raced past the windows, more quickly as the road surface improved.
“Listen to me,” Mary said firmly. “Your dad’s caught up in something. Whatever it is, you need to stay out of it.”
“But he didn’t say anything about my dad.”
Mary just looked at her and Elena knew then she was right. The mill was in this area, too; it had a proper road leading up to it, not a raggedy forestry one, and it was nearby. As the car lumbered into town, Elena was more convinced than ever that something much bigger had happened than anyone was talking about, and somehow Dad was tangled up right in the middle.
CHAPTER 12
2 0 1 8
TODD INSISTS ON driving her to the post office. He says he wants to come, but that’s a lie. He helps her put on her shoes and he buttons up her jacket. She’s having trouble with her hands at the moment, but it will pass.
Unravelling Page 10
