Living on the Borderlines

by Melissa Michal

  When they first married, the smallness of the store had made her feel large, as if she stood out every time. She found it family-like, with cashiers and associates knowing everyone by name and food preference. Maybe that was why it grew to annoy her over time, like only family can. Small town. Small Haida Gwaii.

  Aaron stared at his wife’s profile as she bent over the deli counter and peered through the plastic. She stood a bit taller than him, even in flats. Her red hair shone as brilliant as the morning she had first strode into his shop, though a few grays strayed through her thick mane now. Curls that popped up in the rain framed her face. He heard her repeat her dread of the wet that caused this, rain that poured consistently in their region. He could look at her all day, standing back and waiting. A smile spread when she learned her favorite cheese remained in stock that week. Jonathan at the counter remembered to order it; she didn’t have to ask. The island offered these small moments and pieces of joy. Flights and boats brought things over from the mainland across Hecate Strait, and you took what came in this way.

  He saw that she seized moments a lot like this—took whatever happened and simply strode on through it. And the strength that carried he admired as much as her green eyes. Those eyes knew him well. She paid attention. And she remembered even what he didn’t say. The closeness that was so frightening in the beginning now comforted him.

  They weren’t the kind of couple who finished each other’s sentences. But thoughts they read by a simple gesture or look. A familiarity from years of listening when there were more words.

  Leaning over the wallboard, digging into the carving lines he made, he scooped out wood with his bent knife, clearing layers of years, still never quite reaching the oldest section. But it was down there. He knew that.

  When he drew sketches, he imagined a clean piece of wood, not necessarily free of imperfections, but a starting place. Black pencil scrawled across white drawing papers. These were the official work drafts. Sometimes he found scratch paper and doodled. Scraps of these fluttered out of various books over the years. Square recipe cards, oblong envelopes, magazine ad tear outs—all with his pencil marks. Much of it remaining on paper—not moving to wood grains.

  The pieces he carved were most times commissioned by businesses and organizations, some non-Native, some Native. None of the pieces were completely and utterly his. They would hang or stand where he might never see them. He ran ideas by whoever paid him. And tweaks came from them, not the elders or the clan or the family—but those commissioning. The work brought in money. That was what colonialism added to their culture—basic living needs. He sighed. Maybe there was no way back to the way things used to be. Shaping the wood was honor bound, still a privilege to carve something.

  He tired easily. It came from his knees and his fingers. That meant less patience—sometimes even for carving. He could ignore the signs of growing old with warmer weather. But the fall moving into winter sharpened his aches. Seasons came much sooner than they had in the past, at least in his mind.

  He leaned into the current wallboard—a cruise-ship commission. June heat invaded the workshop, a large comfortable building with high ceilings. Light poured through the line of windows facing red cedars, shore pines, and triangular mountain crevices. He enjoyed this quiet. But the shed was owned by his employer. Really the only way he could have a shop like this. The penciled designs marked carve lines. As he chipped away at a fresh spot, it seemed like the adz didn’t move—merely nicked the wood. But the consistent motion in one place slowly gave way to depth. This made him push harder, to see the adz move into the tree’s veins. His elbows, shoulders, and hands took over.

  The wallboard lay horizontal, parallel to the floor on slats and joints that held its pieces waist-high. Each section contained its own support. Put together, they would eventually be the length of a small fishing boat. Once he made his way to the middle of the piece, Aaron climbed onto the wallboard, pulling up and crawling to the center. With the adz again, he did the same thing, following the veins. The view seemed different to him, like he was in the piece himself. A 3-D man, kneeling, almost prostate to the board in a prayer to the Creator, his hand closer to the iron portion of the adz, his eyes steady on the design. Intent. An eyelid appeared here, a head there.

  Pricks and needlelike pains collided up one muscle and then another. His legs and knees grew stiff. He did this in shifts, up on the board, then down next to it.

  Last section. Last section.

  “You could retire,” Anna had said a few weeks ago. “We could get by. You’ve done this so long.”

  “I’ve got to keep it alive, you know. This way of showing our honor and our people.”

  “Alive for who? You’ve had many apprentices.”

  He turned to her and smiled. He recognized that she was not close to understanding this. He didn’t mind. She came further than others. She was indeed part of their family, now Haida, adopted into the eagle moiety, he raven. These two communities within Haida culture were like relatives. They took care of one another and married from within each other’s communities. They had important responsibilities to each person, each family. She simply did not grow up with this notion. But he knew that if their ways were not done traditionally, people would think they had disappeared, vanished into the grain of the wood. Only to be speculated on by art historians and anthropologists who simply didn’t know how to even try to understand. Anna tried, though.

  “And there are new artists dispelling the myth of the disappearing Indian,” she continued.

  “Ya.” He rather liked the pluck of the artists who were more contemporary. Their designs almost unrecognizable. But his lines, his carvings, moved so far back in the Haida way that he just didn’t know how it all compared. Or what it meant to be keeping things as they were. The contemporary carvers’ messages and their questioning were not his purpose. It was theirs. He built history in his mind—something from the past still proceeding into the future. A portfolio to be replicated in the carver’s own eyes of course, but carried on.

  She tried. Anna tried to live the life—thirty-five years later. And most days she succeeded in being a part of the small island and it being her home.

  She arrived in Haida Gwaii in 1975. She had heard of a man carving totem poles, and that intrigued her. A practicing artisan—someone to engage with rather than study from a book.

  Women did not carve, and she wanted to know why. Nor did they design the weavings or the design boards. Yet, they wove the baskets, the Chilkat robes, headdresses, leggings. They did beading, ceramics, and quillwork. But the designs, the designs came from the men.

  It was like her, then, to jump on a plane and seek the answers, rather than call or write a letter. This brought her to Aaron’s workshop. She expected some older man, gray and bent over. His black hair, thirty-year-old body, and coy grin made for unexpected pleasure.

  She told him her thoughts on the absence of female ideas in their art. He laughed deep in his belly and tilted his head. “You’ll need to learn some things,” he said.

  They married in six weeks. He knew, he told her. “You don’t wait when it’s right. You go for it. And I had to find some way to keep you here, so you didn’t go back.”

  “Aaron, I’m white.” Well, really, she was, but wasn’t. She was mixed. But her family didn’t count that side. Once her grandfather had told her she was Seneca, descended from him, which in a matrilineal society meant that she lost her heritage, her card so to speak. That was all she knew. At the time she didn’t see it as something she was disconnected from, merely something she wasn’t a part of. Such a quiet man and caring. More of his money was spent on other people. Her parents hated that.

  “You’re Irish. American Irish. Yes, that is too bad, isn’t it?” Aaron chuckled. “So. Love’s love, eh.” And that was that.

  From the beginning, neither talked about their backgrounds any further. She just happened to be living within his and taking that on as part of herself. She felt less u
ncomfortable with that as time moved forward, years molded into her the island, the people, and the ways life unfolded there. She accepted these ways.

  Because she didn’t count her Seneca heritage, he didn’t, either. He had raised his eyebrow when she told him. She waved her hand as if to wave away that side, just like her mother when Anna brought it up during her teenage years. She appreciated that he never said anything about her family or background. A quiet agreement to build their own family.

  He always seemed sure of each move. If he sketched it out, Anna noticed, he acted on it. And she could tell when he sketched in his head. He rolled his eyes up to the sky, stared for a moment, and came back down with an idea. She observed those traits the first week.

  She found security in that. He checked himself. He thought about ideas. About important things.

  Anna didn’t think before flying to Haida Gwaii, landing in Skidegate. And she didn’t think before attending Boston University, or leaving it. She went. Off to another of what her parents called “silly escapades.” They rarely visited her in Boston, and then never on the island. But she thought carefully about marrying Aaron. Not because marriage meant leaving college. But because she had never wanted to settle down. It would be a slower life. She could do that. In the back of her mind, maybe she wanted to stop all of the flying about, seeking answers to her many questions—that led her to want marriage and Aaron and no more scattered self.

  As much as her parents detested Anna’s escapades, they were the cause, always being off somewhere without her since she was ten. She remained behind wondering what the place was like, who they met, what they did there. Answers to the world. And that pulled her to India, Mexico, Venezuela, and Haida Gwaii.

  She didn’t need answers with Aaron. Although he patiently answered any questions. Those questions waned and then disappeared as the island gave her answers.

  Anna thought of all those first moments as she steeped some tea. A touch of sugar, but mostly the broken mushroom pieces, dried, at the bottom adding flavor. All this in his usual red mug.

  She found him on their deck, scribbling and then pausing to watch the eagles. Tonight, they caught unending currents above the trees. Their feathers glinted in the fading twilight, tipped by the dusk. A light that would never quite darken this time of year and would remain half-gray. His stare intensified on eagles and then paper as he deepened himself into the lines of the sketch. She set the mug next to him, and the smell of earth and decay rose from the steam, hitting her nostrils. He nodded and winked and put pen back to paper with his other hand on the mug handle. When he lifted it to his lips, he sighed.

  She smiled. The wink turned her heart. So many years and it still did that.

  Back in the kitchen, she scrubbed the dishes with soap. Warm water coursed over the bristles and ceramic. The window in front of her gave way to pines and yellow cedar and salmon berry bushes. Squirrels and birds and the occasional black-tailed deer picked at the berries, content perhaps to share the red-and-orange tartly sweet fruit. Their backyard, as small as it was, became her favorite spot over the years, how it changed in the seasons, but didn’t. The same could be said about the people and the culture of Haida Gwaii. Perhaps that was why she succeeded at living some place so different from herself. To be who she truly was here, rather than be who she wasn’t. Nobody minded that on the island.

  She contemplated Aaron’s design of the Chilkat blanket she had woven her first years there. It hung in the room off of the kitchen, the room with the most light and space.

  Light shone through the windows in Aaron’s apartment. Even after a year of marriage, she still couldn’t quite call it her own. The dappled shadows moved across her painting, darkening colors in some places. She dipped her brush in water, turning the then-red liquid purple.

  She arched her back and stretched her hands behind her. It wasn’t done. But everything she could do in that surge had emerged on the canvas. Anna left her stool and put the teapot on to boil.

  It was a small studio, but the ocean rolled over craggy volcanic rocks scarcely beyond their entryway. When she looked out, it almost seemed like the apartment expanded. At some point, maybe they would have a house with a deck and more space. But she didn’t think she could simply give up being steps from the water, where she could see black points stretched out to sea and feel the salt entering her lungs.

  The spoon clanked against the mug to keep the ceramic from cracking under intense heat. Earl Grey wafted up to her nose as she unwrapped the tea bag. Waves lapped along the edges, and she could hear their slow, but constant movements. A raven’s squawk followed. The clear, cold air never got old. Although she missed the deep warmth of the summers when bones finally thawed.

  The painting remained in her mind. It changed as needed to become what her hands would stroke onto the canvas. Aaron had been trying to talk her into weaving as well. But she couldn’t stop painting. It lived in her fingers and danced out through her brushes. Adrenaline pushed on and filled their walls. A mix of his carvings and her paintings.

  The doctor’s office shrunk that day—as if it had been some optical illusion before—now tiny with three people and little air. The same doctor who cared for his nieces and nephew. When they found out Anna could not conceive, Aaron read her posture as both relief and sadness.

  He watched her eyes move in and out of darkness that day, staving off what she might be denying, he thought. She had often said before this moment that she couldn’t become her mother. He knew she wasn’t her mother, though. With his nieces, she was even more beautiful—purely giving. They were her own family, not simply like her own family.

  They were in their late thirties. Much too late. There wasn’t anything to be done—not with their budget. They considered adoption. But her mother had a stroke months later, and Anna stayed with her for a year. This changed them.

  The time apart made Aaron restless, and he wondered if she would come back. Phone calls came few. And Anna’s voice shook when she spoke. He could have traveled with her and taken a break from commissions. No was her consistent answer. “I have to do this myself.” The stubborn fight he loved turned in the other direction.

  Aaron kept working the year she left. He often caught himself stopping at the small bedroom built into their own. It had never been decorated. But intentions seemed obvious. She had even bubbled with excitement over colors.

  Before her mother’s stroke, he rambled on to Anna about who would take on his carving. Who would he teach in their family? His two brothers and sister, Donna, had daughters. His other sister did have a boy, John. But he refused to learn any Haida culture.

  “I tried, Aaron,” Anna said.

  “I know.” He wanted to take that back, that moment. He forgot himself, her grief, within his own. And then she left.

  When her mother died at the end of that year, she returned to the island. She hadn’t told anyone of the death or her return.

  “It’s not the same here” was all she said for weeks. He figured she meant without her mother.

  Adoption left the table after her return. Anna’s silence clearly desired a shift in life plans.

  Most of the time, family gatherings occurred at his brothers’ or sisters’. Something was going on every month or few months. His siblings’ homes could hold more people and still breathe a little. But now and again, Anna would host in their tiny house anyway. People spilled into every nook of the two-bedroom space from living room to porch to kitchen and dining rooms.

  Guests milled in front of the food and along the chairs and walls. A rumble followed the bodies of people—laughter, talking, whispers, children tagging other children—moving through the walls and creating waves of sound.

  Anna always held the get-togethers in the warmer weather. Their deck and yard then acted like extensions of the house. Aaron built the deck shortly after she returned from caring for her mother. She could sit in the Adirondack chair, now a faded aqua, all summer barring a downpour. Their house sat high enough
that, although the view was mostly green yard and woods, on tiptoe she could make out lapping water that melted into the horizon. During certain sunsets, she caught green flashes that lit up the water, dividing it from the far beyond. The colors struck the valley and ocean every night with different fires. Sunsets never got old.

  Seawater smells drifted in, although roads and fields away. Her body begged, though, to toe-dip mornings, just as she did at their studio. That same saltiness floated from the pots of clam soup and teriyaki salmon. Pasta salads mixed in color with the desserts and the cans of pop in ice buckets.

  There were more cousins standing around the barbecue, cooking various meats, loud belly laughs crossing family barriers of arguments and time. It seemed those were left at the door of their parties. One man wore a Hawaiian shirt with bright-pink flowers. Anna covered her mouth to hide her laughter. Most wore jeans or khakis and tee shirts. This was not the group she grew up with, who so often dressed in the latest styles with heels, skirts, ties, and dress pants. These women instead wore tops and scarves with the formlines, finelines, and ovoids forming whales and bears and eagles. They were supporting local artists, fashion marking family rather than trend.

  She told them, “Don’t bring anything.” They always did. They came bundled down with children and some type of food or paper product, making the tables multicolored and full of flavors.

  It was at these times that Anna didn’t mind the crowds, not like at festivals or the store, where things closed in on her and space mattered. In this house, space was a commodity. And elbows and backs met often. To her, this house felt like a cocoon. Yes, odd. But similar to the idea of swaddling babies. The tighter they were wrapped, the safer they felt.

  She navigated through the kitchen, to the dining room, to the living room, to the porch, and then back to the deck off the kitchen, checking in on each person. Did they have drinks, food? Were they having fun?

  “You fuss. Every time,” said Aaron. He tried to push her into a chair to at least “rest for five minutes.”