Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

  Siena went to investigate the missing creek, had a memory then, of a time when the creek had been beautiful. One spring it had flooded its banks so that when she and her daughter and her son, maybe nine and eleven then, had sat on the swing at the edge, their feet dangling in the risen water. The current was fierce that spring, and they had slipped into the water and been pulled with huge force around two bends until the place where several fallen trees slowed the stream.

  Screaming and laughing, the three of them, laughing because of the speed of the current, screaming because the water was still icy with melt-off. Everything so green. Each spring it felt like that, as if a winter of starvation was being assuaged. Siena remembered how that day had been so much better than the expensive asphalt-paved fair. A better thrill, and free. She and her children had looked into one another’s eyes, wide with excitement, barely believing anything could be so wonderful. And then done it again.

  How could she have forgotten the creek? It must have been the trauma. But it seemed not only she but everyone in the village had forgotten.

  Siena’s heart could not break any more than it had already broken; it had calcified, scarred over. The truth was, she no longer had the strength or hope even to leave and try and find the men. But what was there to stay for? She’d never find Noelle. Noelle was mad or missing or both.

  “They don’t have her in a basement,” the girl with black braids said. She was sitting beside the dead fire.

  Siena stared at her.

  “I heard you say they did one time,” Peter’s friend said. “You were walking, talking, didn’t notice I was here.”

  “Just like now. So how do you know?”

  “It’s a feeling mostly, not that that’s much help, I’m sure. But it’s pretty strong. I’m Liz, by the way.” Siena stared at Liz. Was she a witch? Witches were always taught to pay great attention to their intuition. “Do you have another?” Liz asked.

  “What?”

  “Spider web. My friends took the others, and there weren’t any left that I could find.”

  “Is that why you’re not in school? You came down here looking for a spider web?”

  The girl nodded.

  “What’s his name?” Siena asked.

  “I’ve known him since kindergarten but he acts like my brother. I can’t get him to see me as potential girlfriend material. Noelle’s spider webs are a charm. She’s the patron saint of love.”

  “But I make them, not Noelle.”

  “You make them for her,” Liz said. “So she’ll feel your love and come back. So in that way they’re still hers. And I bet she makes them work for us, from wherever she is.”

  “Did you know Noelle?” Siena asked.

  “We all knew her,” Liz said. “We used to come down here and party. She was a little older. It was a few years ago, back when you still lived in the…” the girl’s voice trailed off, as if she were embarrassed for Siena.

  “House?”

  “Yes,” Liz said.

  “Who lives in my house now?” Siena asked.

  “It’s empty. No one will buy it or rent it.”

  “Maybe if I stop hating them, they’ll give her back. I just can’t figure it.”

  “What did your mother say?” Liz asked.

  “Don’t beat yourself up so much.” Siena laughed at the memory. She’d always been hard on herself, and her mother had always told her to love herself. But then her mother had died, and Noelle had disappeared, and then the men had left. Since then Siena had been hard on herself for pretty well every minute of every day.

  “Here. I have one in my pocket. If I give it to you will you go back to class?”

  “Yes.” The girl held her hand out for Siena’s gift.

  “Did you know there’s a creek under all that garbage?” Siena asked as Liz got up to go.

  “Really? They’re connected, the missing creek, missing Noelle. I’ll get the others and we’ll clean it.”

  “Thanks,” Siena said.

  But what did she mean? Thanks for helping clean the creek or thanks for believing Noelle was still alive?

  Liz was as good as her word. Over the ensuing weeks the teenagers came and built igloos out of Styrofoam they could stay in when their parents kicked them out for being lippy. They made stick piles and burned them. They carted bags and bags of bottles to the recycling bins on Thursday mornings, until every blue box in the village was full. Even Sally Fish came to help; occasionally she found an object she could sell at her weekend sale.

  “It was time to clean the place up,” Sally said. “I had to help, after what they did to Noelle.”

  So she’d heard the truth at last. Siena was glad, but she didn’t make a big deal out of it. After weeks of burning and recycling and land-filling garbage, there was a creek. It was still a little murky, so they planted cattails along the edges. By early fall it ran crystal clear, and there were little brown trout in it, and geese flying in screaming Vs overhead. At first they weren’t very good at it, their Vs misshapen; it reminded Siena of when her son had first learned to drive. She missed him terribly and started to cry all over again, even though the creek cleanup had distracted her all summer, the youngsters and their bonfires and tea had kept her warm. So many of them had found love, and all, they insisted, although Siena still wasn’t sure, because of her magic spider webs. They brought glue guns and glued the walls of her hut together, so it would be less drafty in the coming winter. Peter brought a little window to set into the side.

  But Siena cried, missing her husband. She’d always called him her husband even though they’d never married in a church, but the witch figured God wouldn’t have noticed the difference; what he’d have noticed instead, if he’d been looking or cared, which was doubtful, was how she’d poured everything into her family—scrubbing and cleaning and working and growing vegetables and cooking and canning and washing and hanging clothes until she was so exhausted she couldn’t even remember what her own dreams had been for herself, or if she’d ever even had any. She hadn’t minded; she’d loved them all so much. It had been worth it. And while the family was on the poor side and complained a lot because of it, they were largely happier and more content than they knew. Isn’t it always so? Although there were days Siena had noticed how lucky they were, that a tiny bit of heaven had come unglued from the sky to land at their feet, astonishing them, allowing them to live in it. It was like a secret, and she’d taken the best care of it she knew how. Remembering her lost happiness, Siena began to shake her head then, and muttered, “I tried not to talk about it too much, lest someone notice and try and take it away. They were always doing that, weren’t they?” She dug first haphazardly and then with more frenzy in her pockets where she thought she’d once put away a little string.

  But a hand touched her shoulder then, and made her turn and take a cup of tea, and said, “Maybe they’ll return one day, as geese. Remember that story? They’ll land and shed their feathers and put on clothes,” and again Siena wondered whether Liz might be a witch, whether one could be born into it, and not just trained by one’s own mother.

  “Why would they do that?” Siena asked.

  “Well, if we found Noelle they’d have no reason to stay away,” Liz said, and with a sudden abstracted look on her face got up and wandered away.

  “I know you won’t make them anymore, but you brought so much love into the world making spider webs for her and giving them away,” Peter said. “Maybe Noelle’s supposed to just be the patron saint of love.”

  “You can’t say that to a mother,” Sally Fish said, and again Siena wondered what had happened to the minister’s wife. One day she’d have to ask.

  “Come here!” Liz called, “I found the most amazing feet!” Peter got up, and when he and Siena got to the creek where Liz was pointing he put his arm around the girl and she smiled, a cat in pyjamas, suddenly.

>   There were two dead trees lying across the creek, too big and heavy to move. But beneath them in the now sparkling clear water, there were two elegant feet. And the toes, it was undeniable, were wiggling not just with the current but with life. Siena stepped into the shallows at the edge and leaned over to peer under the tree. A young woman was lying on the soft sand at the bottom of the creek, her arms folded across her chest, a fraying daughter catcher held over her heart. Her eyes were closed. Siena reached in and stroked Noelle’s feet.

  “How do we get her out?” Siena asked the gathered teenagers. “So she can be loved too and not just always create it in other’s people’s lives?”

  “By teaching her to love herself, like you did for us,” Liz said.

  “I didn’t know that’s what I did,” Siena said.

  No Woman Is an Island

  KAREN. I’VE BARELY DARED think of her, thought today of the skirt I gave her years ago. I suddenly realized it was a going away present. A goodbye present: I only saw her once more after that. But which of us was going away?

  And now I can’t not think of her, back on Salt Spring after ten years, in this little cabin where we stayed—a sleeping loft, a little cook stove, and, amazingly, the same even more faded blue print curtain on the window.

  Karen’s son was named Moon. What was Moon’s father called? I feel I could retrieve his name, if it was important enough. But it’s not.

  Homes. What are they made of? After squatting in this cabin and others, working and camping all over British Columbia for years alone, I met Karen and Moon. We hit it off and in the end they lived with me here for almost a year, and then we forged a life plan together. We’d work, buy land, make a family of ourselves. I thought Toronto, my home town, and not Vancouver or Victoria. We didn’t even tell Moon’s father—Karen had stopped forwarding their address or lack of it after what happened the last time he took his son for a weekend. Finding the child uncontrollable, he’d returned Moon to Karen’s doorstep at midnight, not even staying to make sure she was home.

  We had little money and hitchhiked, the three of us, with backpacks and rolled tents. It was September. Moon was nine, I was twenty, Karen was twenty-nine. Moon thought it high adventure to sleep in ditches when we weren’t let off near a campground at night; to coax a flame from damp kindling; to strike the tent himself some mornings; to eat beans and scrambled eggs cooked in a pan over a fire. I remember Karen even offered to demonstrate how to skin and cook a roadkill porcupine. “Gross,” Moon told me, “but quite edible with onions.”

  “Must you?” I declined. Now I think it a shame I didn’t take the chance to learn this extra life skill.

  sss

  Enzo had woken from a dream in which their daughter Katie’s fort had red gaillardias woven through the dishevelled pile of kids’ sleeping bags, signifying, he knew even in the dream, limitless joy. Ending in a disastrous mood as often as not, but still, he’d had such a great time with Katie and her friends, had been even somewhat lax about nutritious meals and bedtime and teeth brushing but perhaps that was the point. If one stopped obsessing over propriety for a sweet short moment sometimes lasting an entire weekend about their hair their baths their laundry their three square, they let you into their incredible secret, more: would teach you how to participate in infinite joy.

  But the next morning, their daughter’s amusing nine-year-old friends gone home, Enzo worried again. Right at this moment Azalea might be kayaking in the cold and wet. He was surprised to find no anger in himself at her leaving, ditching him with the kid. He just wanted her home safe. Badly.

  sss

  I remember Karen and I walking in the railway lands at the foot of Bathurst Street, a break from job-and-apartment hunting. We came upon an empty old boxcar and found a plastic bag of toiletries and other small items, a sleeping bag, a comic lying open beside it. “Let’s sit and read the comic,” I said, completely charmed.

  Karen replied, “It’s their home; it would be rude to go in without being invited,” and I was humbled, feeling as always she saw more than me. I so desperately wanted to wear that home as my own, just for a few minutes. I would trespass for the sake of my fantasy, not even seeing how fragile this tiny home was, how doubly important to respect its ephemeral boundaries.

  Living in a city again I needed to work so I could pay for rent and food; knew already how hard it would be to save a down payment, not spend it in bars and restaurants, on clothes, anything to wash the feel of eight hours of shift work away. On Salt Spring we’d been able to live rent free in our borrowed cabin, eat off the land, at least to an extent. I loved it. It was Karen who grumbled. She already had a child, even then almost ten years old. He’d be a young adult now. For how long was I oblivious, as she hardened herself against the disapproving gaze?

  The cabin is on Crown Land. My old friend Elm pays a pittance for his lease. “What is public land for if people can’t make homes on it,” Karen used to say, and with what fervent desire I wanted her to be right.

  sss

  Why didn’t Azalea write or call? It had been more than a week. Enzo read her computer journal, for herself alone. He began at the beginning. Azalea wrote, five years before:

  I bought Karen a skirt. I don’t know why. We’ve never felt the need to make showy gifts to one another. We had such dreams, Karen and I. I remember how, after we came east, two months into city life I hated walls already. I missed tents badly; just enough of a roof to keep the rain off. Karen and I worked in clubs at night, and soon all the peace of the forest had gone to noise. But not quite all; so often as I hustled tables, I was kayaking along a forested coast in my mind, watching for whales.

  And now Enzo and I have a house full of appliances. Why? So that our daughter won’t grow up to be like Karen. We live as if we believed machines could protect us. Yet Karen grew up surrounded by appliances too, and they didn’t protect her. Even more than Karen, I wonder what Moon’s doing now.

  Before it came back to him Enzo briefly wondered who Karen was. He wondered who his own friends were. Scrolling through pages he saw that Azalea wrote about Karen more than she wrote about him—he could think of no one who took up as much space in his life. Except, of course, for her. Azalea herself.

  Who were his friends? His mother, his daughter. Azalea, Enzo had thought, but now he wasn’t so sure. Did friends walk away from one another? Was that sometimes a necessary part of friendship? And the question begged asking: abandon one another to what?

  And which of them had abandoned the other?

  There were old friends from high school and university he talked to once or twice a year. They seemed so far away from his life now, a distance too large to be breached. They wouldn’t be able to offer comfort if he called, because he wouldn’t tell. Tell them what?

  Azalea’s gone.

  And Karen? She was a single mother, a few years older than Azalea. The two women had travelled the west coast before they came to Ontario, where Azalea met Enzo, did the married thing. Went back to school. They had a child.

  But what happened to Karen? And what happened to Azalea, to make her leave?

  sss

  I phoned Enzo to tell him I’m not coming home yet, to dependably shop for school clothes, set the alarm, pack lunches for the big day. He didn’t tell me I was cruel or neglectful, just told me Katie was fine and asked me when I’d come. Not sure, I said. I felt selfish, yet what about his cruelty? How impassively he sat by while I lost myself in years of laundry and cooking and scrubbed floors and isolation, so often alone with the child. The baby drove me crazy in love and towards desperation in equal measures. I wrote papers for school in the wee hours and broke into occasional sobs of exhaustion Enzo found unaccountable.

  I suppose I’m having a bit of a nervous breakdown, leaving as I so suddenly did but without crying jags, temper tantrums, or an inability to get out of bed. This time I just bought a plane ticket inst
ead, without warning Enzo. Looking for some peace, wanting to be alone. And now I am alone, yet not feeling isolated at all. Funny, that.

  sss

  Enzo began a journal, after Labour Day weekend came and went, after Katie chirped through Cheerios and scrambled eggs, onto the school bus.

  8 September: The man who lent her the cabin then still lives in the same house in Victoria; she called him, asked if she could use it again. Was happy he remembered her. He works in broadcasting now, calls himself Elmer again.

  Perhaps, right now, Azalea sits at the wooden table, writes by kerosene lamp, for (I imagine) it’s a heavy overcast day. She listens, awed by how happy she is, to the surf on the stones outside the window. Yesterday, kayaking, she saw orcas.

  It was his first journal entry, ever. Suddenly, he was like Azalea. And Karen too, he’d bet twenty bucks; he suddenly remembered the two women talking: how soothing they found their journals. Azalea gone, no longer reminding him where his car keys were, his memory quickened. Funny how that worked.

  sss

  Why is this the only place I can talk about God, even to myself—far from any neighbours, not even a road, only a kayak to go coastwise around to the village? Because my life here is so potentially dangerous I need one. As are all our lives, every day, but we hide behind machines so we don’t have to look. Dangerous, yet beautiful, and most importantly what seemed necessary: the right to make a small home out of small things. Wash each night one cup one spoon one pan.

  My computer is an appliance that doesn’t wash dishes or clothes; instead, it rinses my soul. I wonder whether Enzo has booted up my journal at home—it’s not password protected. If he was away, and he kept one, would I be able to resist? It terrifies me to be possibly so exposed, even to my husband. Enough complaints in there about him to be sure, gentle as he is. And perhaps better there than spoken aloud always—for I’m no paragon myself. Yet part of me is relieved by the possibility: at last he’d know all.