Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  And when we located the Talisman, we felt lucky. It felt like we were somewhere in the middle of a western town. It was an older motel but very well-kept, with huge baskets of flowers, a block from the river where that trail meandered along its banks for some 5.5 kilometres. When we checked in, the woman at the desk told us that a complimentary breakfast was served in the lobby each morning. Inside, the rooms were fresh and clean, the air conditioning units were quiet, the bathroom stocked with huge fluffy towels, the kitchenette large enough to prepare meals if one wished. We didn’t, but we’d brought food to have with a glass of wine once my brother arrived from Vancouver (he was doing the drive in one long day), so we stocked the fridge with olives, cheese, hummus, a bottle of excellent Pinot Grigio, some beer, and cider.

  Trembling aspens can occur in huge, long-lived clones that may be thousands of years old.

  — Parish, Coupé, and Lloyd, Plants of Southern Interior British Columbia

  It was years since we’d been in Quesnel. When our children were young, we passed through a couple of times on family camping trips. I had no recollection of the long bright plantings of petunias everywhere, and the leafy parks. We’d always been in a hurry, it seemed, and kept our eyes open for Highway 26 to Barkerville, or the road west to my brother’s ranch in Nazko, where we visited his family two or three times in those years. Quesnel itself is a small city with a rough reputation though it has seen significant history; it was the commercial centre during the Cariboo gold rush, a role now commemorated with a huge gold pan welcoming visitors to the city. Lumber mills and ranching formed its current economy and a wild summer festival, Billy Barker Days, brought in tourists.

  It was hot, in the mid thirties, but we walked into the centre of town to explore a little and see where we might have dinner that evening with Gordon. We saw an Italian place and a Greek restaurant where we knew we’d get the predictable but always tasty plates of souvlaki with roast potatoes and a heap of rice, a mound of salad dense with raw onion, topped with feta. There was a Mr. Mike’s — I hadn’t seen one of those in years though they were standbys of childhood, one of the only places my family would go to on a Friday night if my father felt he could afford to take a family of six out for a meal. Several places proclaimed Western and Chinese menus. The smell of charred burgers wafted out of the Dairy Queen. We’d eaten Greek food the night before, so were prepared to lean heavily on Gordon to try the Italian restaurant.

  How strange, I thought, that my brother from Vancouver and I, from the Sunshine Coast had to arrange to share a motel unit in Quesnel in order to spend some time together. When John and I would pass through Vancouver, we’d think of Gordon and his family; but we were always on our way to distant pastures. Sometimes our destination was the airport, to greet children or fly away ourselves. Or else we’d come to the city with theatre tickets and plans for an intimate dinner together before or after the play. Gordon’s family’s roads led south, to Seattle, where a daughter and beloved grandchildren live. Or Brazil, to more family. Never mind. It was great to hear his key in the door and wonderful to sit in the cool room, drinking wine and toasting the next day’s happy pair.

  “Why would anyone, particularly in a town like Quesnel, name their restaurant Penisola?” I wondered, while tucking into a plate of fairly good pasta. I was imagining the graffiti already, the jokes in the nearby pub. Gordon and John were thoughtful over their indifferently breaded and fried veal, and then both of them guffawed. There was no way to make it sound nice. The red wine was robust and we drank a lot of it, returning to our motel to watch the football game (them) or read in bed (me). We made our plans for the morning: whoever was up first would make coffee and go to the lobby for muffins and bagels. Then a walk along the river, the trail meandering through parkland and behind industrial areas, by aspens and birches, tall firs and spreading Saskatoons, talking about everything under the sun, before showering and dressing to drive out to Nazko for the wedding at 2:00 p.m.

  The first time I’d driven to visit my oldest brother Dan, then living in the teacherage at Nazko as a first-year teacher, it took me more than two hours to manoeuvre my small Datsun over the rough road. In certain areas, it was as runnelled and boggy as a corduroy road through a marsh. I had a friend with me, some produce from her family’s farm in the Fraser Valley, and a big box of apples purchased along the way at a roadside stand in Spences Bridge. My friend, a classmate from the University of Victoria, was as curious as I was to see the country west of Quesnel; we studied the map I brought with me over coffee north of Hope and marvelled at the thin blue scribbles of rivers all over the page.

  As it turned out, we loved it. It was early October and I remember the aspen leaves were turning and trembled, golden on their stems. It was on that trip that someone told me the Native people called it “woman’s tongue” for its soft incessant noise, a notion I recognized later when reading the Scots poet Patrick Hannay (a contemporary of Evelyn):

  The quaking aspen . . .

  Resembling still

  The trembling ill

  Of tongues of womankind . . . 5

  The air was so crisp, a perfect companion to the apples we ate as we drove, windows open a fraction of an inch for its sweetness.

  The road has vastly improved since then, and the drive out to the wedding was smooth. We saw a moose in a swampy area and many birds — hawks, in particular. The turnoff to my brother’s home on Rainbow Lake had balloons on a post, and a sign — Lisa and Chad’s Wedding — to lead us in. The garden was lush (my sister-in-law Linda confessed to weeks of hard work to get it ready for a wedding), there were chairs set up near a log shed with an arbour erected to frame the bride and her groom, children ran in the grass and dogs ran with them, glad of the company. Guests wore clothing appropriate to their notion of a wedding. Gordon changed into the suit he’d brought in the trunk of his car, I had a long simple dress of linen and silk, John wore his best shorts and a summer shirt. Lisa’s mother Linda changed quickly from her cut-offs and T-shirt to a dress of oyster satin and looked as young as a bride herself. Dan wore dark jeans, a western shirt, and suspenders to hold up his pants over a prosperous belly. The father of the groom was identically clothed. Those who’d driven the long road from the lower mainland or Vancouver Island were more formally dressed than those who lived in the Cariboo, where a clean shirt or a cotton sundress served as festive wear and was just right in that weather. John was the exception, having refused to even consider long pants and a sports jacket in the heat of July.

  When everyone was seated and the music began, the wedding party began to promenade towards the arbour. The wives of Lisa’s brothers were resplendent in satin; small boys in suits pulled even smaller boys in wagons, their shirts untucked and clip-on ties askew; Lisa’s daughter, strewing flowers as she walked to the arbour, was pretty in pink; and then the bride herself, strong and beautiful on her father’s arm. The minister, a small man in a leather vest with a big crucifix around his neck, spoke overly long about sin and God, but then Lisa and Chad were kissing and the cameras caught every moment from every possible angle. Guests stood on the long verandah, out of the heat, drinking cool water and eating sandwiches and fruit.

  Calls went out for family photos. Gord and I looked at each other expectantly, straightened our clothes, and began to rise, to walk out to join the laughing and jostling extended family gathered by the flowery arbour. We quickly realized that the Kishkans being summoned weren’t us so we casually walked down to the lakeshore instead, pretending it didn’t matter. There were calls for Kishkan girls — on this day, in this place, these were the bride, the wives of her brothers, and her mother.

  The distance between our home on this coast and this home in the Cariboo was identical; and the visits far too occasional on both sides; but there is nothing like a wedding or a funeral to both exaggerate and — possibly — bridge that distance. We hadn’t kept in touch. It was as simple and as complicated as that. While the cameras flashed and arrangements of Kishkans
and Sandfords continued, we headed back to Quesnel to shower and rest before the reception that evening. We were quieter driving back than we had been earlier, but it was hot and the day had already been long and full. Trembling aspens in graceful groves beside the road reminded me that there is more to families than what we see on the surface. Like those trees, my brothers and I shared both root-stock and memory, tangled lines the casual observer would not see nor understand. The absences in the family photographs would be invisible to almost everyone.

  How relieved we were to see the chilled wine bottles being placed on each table when we entered the Seniors Centre in Quesnel for the reception at 6:00. It was still hot, inside and out. My nephews, Lisa’s brothers, moved affably from table to table with corkscrews, opening the bottles of peach and melon wine, each with its celebratory label: a photograph of the bride and her groom. There were also glasses of dry white or red wine or bottles of beer available from the cash bar and we sat at our table on the edge of the room, the three of us on the outside of a table for eight, so we could see into the crowd, saving room for any others who might arrive late and need seats (no one did). The music was country favourites, perfect for the location and event. The bride and groom swept into the room to strains of “Jackson,” while the guests rose to their feet and cheered. This was not an uptight country club event but a robust celebration of a beloved daughter / granddaughter / sister / niece and her childhood friend, now husband. Both had been through earlier relationships — Lisa’s produced two beautiful children — and then rediscovered each other in their thirties.

  The food was plentiful and good. Roast beef, chicken, perogi rich with butter and onions, and salads; and the speeches were full of love and every possible wedding trope: fairy tales, knights in shining armour, happy endings. The families had known each other for the entire lives of their children, so good-natured insults were traded loudly across the room by the two fathers-in-law like something out of a hillbilly movie, each man straining at his suspenders. Except it felt genuine. My nephews spoke of their sister with humour and an astonishing tenderness.

  We stayed long enough to watch the bride dance with her father, then her new husband. The atmosphere was happy and loud. The beer was popular and no one bothered with glasses. The mother of the bride in oyster satin lifted a few herself, and the children raced around on the dance floor in their festive clothes, shoes abandoned. I wished my own children had been present, but they lived too far away — and in any case, hadn’t seen their cousins in years. We’d visited a few times when they were small, camping at my brother’s place, and taking canoes out onto Rainbow Lake. But as they grew, it was in another direction, needing a different kind of nourishment, though of course all of us shared that original root-stock, its dense spreading tangle.

  Walking back, I was surprised at my tears. Surprised at my sense of otherness at a family occasion, where in all honesty, I hadn’t even expected to feel like I belonged. To see the Kishkan girls in their formal dresses, flowers in their hair, and not to hear anyone say, But wait, there’s another girl, let’s not forget her. Though I am now in my fifties and hardly girlish.

  Surprised, having driven this long distance, to find out how far I was away from my own true family, the brothers I had grown up with, all of us polite and glad to see the others but almost unknown to one another in our later years.

  There had been ghosts at our table at the reception, shadows in the empty chairs. A girl and her brothers, their eventual children. Their parents.

  At the Talisman, I thought about families and their journey from original intimacy. I bathed with my brothers, wore their hand-me-downs, learned how to throw a baseball at their instruction. I travelled across Canada with them in a station wagon, sleeping at night in our blue tent; we roasted marshmallows on sticks in glowing coals, pulled bottles of cream soda from icy water at gas stations from Field to Drummondville to Dartmouth. My father photographed us, lined up by age, in front of historical cairns and restored farm implements, all across the country.

  I knew my brothers’ scent in the dark of the tent — weedy hair from swimming in lakes, smoke from the campfire. When we reached a new place, during the years of my father’s transfers, we were company for one another, shared our comic books, played hide-and-seek in teams — older two versus the younger two. Once, when an older kid threatened me in Halifax, my brothers sought him out and let him know that they would defend me, no matter what.

  We had camped on St. Mary Lake on Salt Spring Island and taken our father’s rowboat out in the mornings to find abandoned homesteads, imagining our lives into those houses. Later, our bathing suits hung on the line my mother strung across the campsite, damp intimate reminders. Yet I have barely seen them for twenty or more years — a day here or there; once for a funeral; twice for anniversaries.

  And there was one brother missing from this scenario, who has taken himself far from the rest of us, who has severed his branch from our particular family tree. Yet a tree remembers its missing limb, grows protective layers of bark over the scar. I remembered what I’d read about the trembling aspen, that it “reproduces mainly from root suckers following disturbances” and hoped that this might also be true of our story.

  There was a breakfast next morning, at the riverside home of Chad’s parents. A huge platter of pancakes, kept warm with aluminum foil, sausages, scrambled eggs, a large jar of saskatoon berry jam, syrup, an urn of coffee. The big tray of Nanaimo bars and brownies that someone forgot to put out at the reception the evening before was emptied in minutes. Dozens of people gathered. The lawn sloped to the Fraser and it was fine to stand there and watch the water heading down to the coast. This was an opportunity for family members like us who’d travelled a distance to visit with each other, catch up. Although our absence was noted at the previous weddings of my nephews, I think our presence this weekend was hardly noticed. People were polite but not curious.

  A little moment reminded me of how far my own children were from Dan’s children: someone from his wife’s family wondered when the next family wedding would be. Much speculation about how long it would be before everyone gathered together again to celebrate a marriage. In my presence, my brother suggested each niece or nephew or cousin once or twice removed and how likely it might be that they would be next. From the fringe of the conversation, I smiled — but my heart kept asking, Why wouldn’t my children count as family? Silly question. Of course I know why. They are barely known.

  We said our goodbyes, all of us promising to get together sooner rather than later, and began our drive south, to Clinton where we spent the night. It was so hot. We settled into the Nomad Motel, then walked to the local pub for cold wine and a burger. Later we visited the Clinton Museum, and I looked at the displays of ancient farm tools, mining equipment, and photographs of pioneers long since dead but also vitally present in the implements they’d cared for and left.

  Somehow my muddled feelings of remorse for letting my brothers drift from me as they had and pleasure at having spent time in their company and sadness for not knowing them better eased into something like reflection at the passing of time and water and hills of pines, some dying of beetle damage and others scorched by fire, but small groves surviving. Nothing so dramatic as fire had caused our disturbance and among the trembling aspens, the leaves whispered of possibilities.

  What is nostalgia but a longing for a time and a place, a hope to return there? That place was not my brother’s log house on the shore of Rainbow Lake, though some elements of our relationship were evident there: a canoe tied to a dock, swimsuits on the rail, fishing poles leaning on a shed. We were as necessary and as obsolete as ploughs and horse collars, a pick and shovel from a forgotten claim where someone had intended to dig deep for riches and was disappointed, though perhaps the ore was just a little farther down.

  There was a story in the Miyazaki House which I knew I’d pursue. Stories in the Clinton Museum I’d think about and reflect upon. But the story of families
drifting apart and then momentarily brought together for a wedding or a funeral — where is the place for that? It’s a story as old as time, as old as the memory of travelling through the canyon in a station wagon watching the Thompson River on its inevitable progression towards the Fraser, then the sea.

  Sitting on my hands in excitement at the prospect of camping or ice cream at one of the fruit stands along the highway, I’d listen to my brothers bicker and joke while our father shouted impatiently for quiet; the snap of the cigarette lighter pulled from its socket. Back then, I was the only Kishkan girl, hair in pigtails, passed-down jeans rolled up to mimic pedal pushers. Over the course of a summer trip, my brothers sang endless versions of “The Quartermaster’s Store” in voices that rang, then cracked and descended an octave. I never dreamed then that a wedding might be the only thing to bring us briefly together again . . . because it was impossible to imagine a world without them.

  Arboretum

  A Coda

  I am thinking about how the world changes as we sit by our windows, chop wood for our stove, take our familiar walks up the mountain or through the winter woods. Driving out for groceries or meals with friends, we notice the new houses, a recent road leading down to Oyster Bay or carved into the side of Mount Daniel; and on summer days we are irritable about the crowds at our favourite swimming spot on Ruby Lake, remembering when it was just a tiny clearing among hardhack and cedars, the smell of wild mint pungent as we spread out our towels.