They lived innocent and oblivious until Grandfather’s accident that others said was no accident, after which Grandmother took to her bed for weeks at a stretch unable to bear the new condition of her life. Olive was sent to town then, and suddenly they knew everything all at once like a swamping.
Olive still dreams of Grandmother sitting on the kitchen table chair rocking herself to and fro after learning Grandfather’s body had been dredged up by a dragger boat. In Olive’s reliving, Grandmother murmurs her broken heart into the room like an incantation while pulling one hand along the other from her wrists. She softly peeled away at the thin skin like these hands of hers were dirty gloves she had forgotten to remove and now must discreetly be rid of before found out. Grandmother has always stared searching at her hands when she feels unease. This motion: her unravelling.
He done it out on the water so no one would have to clean it up after him, sweet man.
Grandmother would air her epiphanies like winter wool on the line regardless of who was in age range or understanding. And so Olive and her cousins quick learned the logistics of chosen loss. They regularly recounted to each other where they were when they learned Pop died, this small conjuring a ritual, a game.
I was over on the slipway.
I was catching minnows in the brook.
I was waiting for a new couch set ordered from Sears.
Olive longs for the before hands when Grandmother wished aloud, as she does now given an audience and opportunity, that she could keep all her lovely grandbabies in that sleigh box eating cold raisins and napping as her lovely tidy man pulled them through the woods atop the fallen snow.
But she could not.
She was old now and no one cares for an old woman’s concern. Olive’s only grandmother.
When she dies, Olive will have no grandmother, she warns to prepare her but also to focus her admiration. Which was only true because her father’s mother knew nothing of her, or did and couldn’t say.
Grandmother’s voice always pitching up and down as they were tossed like little balls of dough in too much clothing. Pleading to shed a layer in the sleigh while they went through the thick trees. But no, she would insist, the wind off the lake would cool the sweat on their bodies and the chill would sit on their shoulders like a cloak or get in their bones like disease.
Back then she would tell Olive and her cousins stories of themselves to distract.
Grandmother would account for the shifting terrain and space out her especially favourite parts of storytelling for the flat bit where the dogs running alongside were quiet and it was just the ski-doos’ revving engines to compete with. Up and over the ridges they would travel, with daylight laying on the blankets casting different colours over them depending on where they sat. Olive preferred to sit under a blue blanket and pretend it was like swimming in open air as they all coasted across the lake surfaces, occasionally peeping out through the box slats to check on their progress toward the deep interior where the poaching camp sat.
You can’t poach what you owns be rights, Grandmother would wink.
All of Olive’s best memories are from before her grandfather died and her mother moved away. She remembers that bouncing along the ridges in the forest path was like being bounced on a person’s foot but better because there was no person or foot involved. This foot bouncing game has always troubled Olive. The same adults repeatedly wanted to play it and would look too intently into your face as they popped you up and down on their skin boot.
You can wear skin boots in town again now.
First when Olive arrived in town, you could not. The doctor had frowned down at her tapped boots and warned that people were sensitive about seals. This, of course, made no sense. Olive was fond of her boots. They were good boots. But the doctor said the sensitive people would become angry and yell and throw paint and bought her a pair of real Canadian premium leather boots made in China. Olive tried to defend her boots. She said they were made by a person she knew. She had seen the skins stretched on a frame by Aunt Jessie’s house knowing they would make her own boots. She had sat eating strawberry sugar wafer cookies while Grandmother and Aunt Jessie brushed the fur free, commenting on the beautiful tobacco colour the boots would be when they were finished.
This was before that fellow the Bannerman Park moms disliked began parading the streets in his coat. Before he declared the seal hunt a point of pride. Before it was decided popular and fashionable by his wealthy friends, Olive was made to feel ashamed of her beastly boots.
But all leather boots are beastly by nature.
This whole debate discouraged Olive from wearing her mother’s coat as well. Because she would feel miserable if someone threw red paint on her beloved coat that was a little too short in the sleeves and a little too wide in the waist. Before she went into care, Grandmother had re-trimmed the hood with a foxtail tip in the centre. She kept a blue Tupperware container of fur pieces overhead for just this kind of thing. It was how she showed her love. Grandmother felt responsible for all the hurt though she had never laid a hand on any of her grandbabies.
Olive lost her mother’s coat.
And the remorse she feels over losing that coat is like being homesick for a home that doesn’t exist anymore. There is no way to answer it back when it calls out to you just after dark. It is overwhelming grief. And so dumb. It is so dumb for her to grieve a coat so aggressively when she has lost so much more than a coat in her short lifetime. But this coat with the foxtail tip made her feel all at once like things might be okay until she woke up one day without it. She searched every inch of the grimy flat and found worse than her coat. She found a different woman’s coat. A mistake. Another one. Maybe that was the start of this new downhill slide.
Nothing nice had happened to her since.
* * *
Before the b word was flung in full-fledged ancient hate, an argument could have been made in the Mayor’s defence.
Damian approaches the scene reluctantly and hyper-aware of the booze his body is focused on metabolizing. He places his man mask on as that is the only mask acceptable in this particular circumstance. He will play the only privilege card he has and so demands to know what is going on here before he spots John coming out of the kitchen. He knows now this will escalate fast.
John is in hard checkmate today. His father-in-law will be here any minute and Iris remains shamed and shocked to a full standstill. She will be embarrassed by her lack of action later. Damian has heard her replay similar scenes. Always with the same forlorn disappointment in herself. Always with the same desire to be a better woman.
I’m a bad woman, she says to no one after service, head hung, picking at her cuticles.
Damian did not think her any worse a woman than he was a gay guy. He most of the time let himself pass as hetero because it was his right to do so and none of anyone’s business. This made his sister angry. Melanie said that he was ashamed of himself when he had nothing to be ashamed of, and Damian would quip that he had lots to be ashamed of but it wasn’t sucking dick. Sometimes Melanie buys him packs of fresh socks with patterns on them because new socks are a little nice thing that she thinks Damian deserves. Damian knows he doesn’t but he wears them anyway cause the rest are dirty on the floor.
Damian hasn’t seen the floor in his bedroom for months.
Sometimes he pushes all to the side, up against the wall, in an attempt to reclaim some space, but it is temporary. The next time he needs a shirt he will swan dive into the heap until he locates something passable. Everything smells vaguely of the gym. His one fitted sheet has been off the right
-hand corner for ages. He could easily pull it over the edge again but he never does. Tom would line-dry the laundry. Damian would press his face into the pillowcase and breathe as deeply as his worn lungs would allow. He always slept soundly in those sheets.
John is amongst them, pushing his sleeves up to his armpits, the webbing of his hands running up and down his biceps. Every gesture is as purposeful as a warm-up. John is dying to evict someone. His body language screams welcome to my gun club. Damian would burst out laughing. Or into tears if he felt the freedom to do so. But the dining room is much too ramped up to allow emotional liberties. All stand in position, rank and file behind John, who is speaking in his slow voice.
I cannot allow you to speak to her like that.
A quiver of hope runs through Iris. Maybe he does love her. Surely.
Though what John means is I am the only man who is allowed to speak to her like that.
The Mayor is recounting his grievances, there is a debate in his timeline, the others cannot attest to Iris’s behaviour before their arrival and so wash their hands of the whole conflict. But the Mayor persists. He has always found it hard to locate his off switch. A total lack of accountability has moved his shutdown out of reach. Besides, he has already invested too much bravado to back down. He applies sunk cost to all aspects of his life and so forges on, degrading the young waitress who did not know her place.
Which is the only truth in this exchange.
Iris does not know where she stands.
The temperature of the room grows steady hotter.
Major David and John are both playing at alpha until the true alpha walks in an easy hour late for lunch. The mere appearance of Big George takes the wind out of them all. It is nearly like the heavenly father has appeared while the holy conclave was in upheaval pronouncing a new heavenly father.
Everyone’s legs are gone.
They share in the mortification as the dining room goes quiet. The hum of the coolers can be heard over the wind outside. The hush of hard breathing is interrupted by the ice maker making ice. Big George has long ago harnessed instrumental automation. The human machines in his employ are far less manageable.
What seems to be the problem here?
No one speaks because you never raise your hand when the teacher asks a question.
John?
Do not speak until spoken to.
I am trying to discern that myself.
Wait for others to get it wrong.
David?
Only after the process of elimination has eliminated wrong answers should you come forward.
The waitress was conducting herself in a very unprofessional manner.
Lay blame immediately to deflect responsibility.
Is that so?
She said you were fat.
Make it personal.
Excuse me, what?
I never.
Yes, yes, she insulted you.
Always always stick to your story.
Iris, what happened?
And just like that an arm has breached the surface, grabbed hold of her nearly drowned frame and hauled her up on the deck. She sputters to speak, she has swallowed so many words, they come out in bursts; like a choking child, the urge to cross her hands atop her larynx overwhelms her until she finally coughs out the word bitch.
Well, I am sure you misunderstood his meaning.
It turns out the man who pulled her from the pool is also the man who built it.
But but but.
Iris has a mouth full of conjunctions, they are being shook up inside her, she is carbonated self-defence, the pressure released with the smallest hissing sound out of her nostrils. John has heard this sound before and has memorized the signs preceding implosion.
He has memorized a lot of things about her.
But but but.
John would never admit to being the cause of the hissing for fear of retribution. He is a lowly lifeguard. He threw her in so he might save her later and be deemed a hero.
Why don’t you just say you’re sorry to the Mayor so we can all get back to our places.
And Iris says she’s sorry. And everyone resumes their places. Like it is nothing to be called a bitch. At your place of work. In front of all your co-workers. And your lover. And his wife.
Big George orders a bottle of wine that is not on the wine list as the four, now a five top, is seated. He requests that John return with it himself. Big George claims to not typically drink during the day though everyone knows he does. The sommeliers love to see him coming. They purchase bottles just for such occasions. Everyone at the table pretends that this is not the case. They laugh in their good-natured way like betas bowing. John offers up an edgy chortle when he returns with the bottle. The barb does not escape his father-in-law, who makes a production of having him explain the wine as he pours. John’s ignorance is aptly marked. Of course he has not a clue about it and calls Iris over, claiming she is prepping for a level two test.
The practice will be good for her.
And Iris’s brain buzzes with pertinent and not so pertinent information.
She says, this is a 1989 Brovia Barolo Monprivato.
She thinks, your daughter and I share this man.
She says, it is from a traditional hillside village in northwest Italy.
She thinks, he has tripped us up in some triangle.
She says, the grape, Nebbiolo, is often described as tar and roses.
She thinks, please stop him before we are all worse hurt.
Big George eyes the thin waitress as she continues on. Tar and roses is right.
He can see the appeal in her. He cannot tell if she is better-looking than his George, though, because he cannot see his daughter as appealing. He can just see her as his daughter. Her lean teenage limbs stretched across the floral sofa in the formal living room with a heavy quilt around her shoulders like a shawl reading some heaving Brontë novel while weeping into her tea.
Sometimes she would call out at night for him to turn off her lamplight. Often she would be reading some thriller novel and too full of fear to move. He would be down the hall working late, or drinking late, awake anyway, and hearing her call him convinced him this was the real reason he was up. He would huff from whatever seated position and plod down the hallway, up the staircase, down another hallway, a miracle really that he could hear her, and pick up the book as he gave her a little peck on the forehead. Always the same request not to dog-ear the corner, his great lover of books. Big George would pull a receipt from his pocket and tuck it inside while shaking his head.
I don’t know why you read books that scare you. This was a little bedtime bit they did. They both knew she was not really scared while he was awake, which was partially why he was awake. He could not refuse her these quiet hours of reading. He longed for her to stay forever quietly reading tucked in bed. Or propped up on pillows in front of a fireplace. The fire lighting the raw feelings flickering across her engrossed features. His George had a pensive look to her. She was so utterly focused. Big George has no such desire to see raw feelings on his baby’s face now. Because that is how he thinks on her when she cries. His baby. His hurt girl.
And his desire to take John by the throat surges. He has to clench his fists to quell the violence inside himself. They have given this man everything and this is how he thinks to repay them. Fucking the help. George will see him hung up for this. He would gladly kick the chair out himself. One swift boot to the bucket and down John comes, twitching.
* * *
All that cow’s milk is after ma
king Iris’s feet too big
for her body.
That’s what Olive’s nan would say. Not like her Olive, who was perfect proportioned in Grandmother’s eyes because she had been reared on pap and country food. Olive still tears white bread apart and pours milk overtop of it when she has an upset belly. She eats it from a mug with a spoon while standing in the dark kitchenette. The light bulb overhead having blown out ages ago is not even thought on. The pap provides her comfort and then Olive sleeps. Grandmother never trusted Old MacDonald and his fast-food farmed friends. She said he transported sad pigs in dark trucks through the night so rich people did not have to see the disrespected animals.
Everyone knows what’s wrong in their heart, Grandmother says, it is their brains that don’t know stuff anymore.
Grandmother said a lot of things before Olive went into care. In the short weeks leading up to Olive’s departure, Grandmother tried to rally, remember and then say all the things she thought that Olive would ever need to know.
Eating and drinking unreal food in an unreal place makes people feel unreal.
They would not be able to tell the difference after their guts had been turned. They would not know what the truth was if the only thing they put inside was lie after lie after lie. She begged Olive not to eat lies. Olive thought maybe Grandmother’s mind was going to pieces because of being old and lonely and sad.
But Olive cannot believe a lot of what happens will happen until it does.
That night in the hotel, she could not believe anything. She could not believe how quickly she hated the man wearing the shiny gold dragon shirt. The gold dragon lit the man’s fat face like a cheap flashlight. This man she had met at the bar some months before getting hired, Rog they called him, was already sweaty with energy drink and vodka. He was clearly obsessed with flight and spoke constantly about wings.
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club Page 22
