“No, Mrs. Thomas, I haven’t put my mother in a home. I would never do that.”
From a blanket under the willows down by the river, they’d moved into the bedroom he shared with the other priest. How crazy they’d been. Parishioners knocking, frantic with loss. She, curled up deep in the bed, listening to them on the other side of the bedroom door. He coming in all dark with Spanish anguish, looking for his shoes, the secrets of the parish lodged in his throat. And that last time, the other priest back early from his road trip, the key in the door. She’d tumbled out the window and scurried across the wet grass to pull on her clothes in the shadow of Mrs. Thomas’s house. Her shoes forgotten in the hurry and his sperm inside her because the sound of the key startled him, his fear exploding. Nothing as exciting as that fear. She’d been vibrating as she stood there, her bare feet in the dark soil, careful of the plants. Waiting for him to call her back in. Certain that nothing could keep them apart. Janna, taking root inside her.
Mrs. Thomas had come to her mother’s funeral and stood at the back in a black dress and jacket, a white lace handkerchief tucked in her sleeve. The shine of ironing on the stiff skirt even then marked the beginning of her long slide. Why, Isabel had raged as the handkerchief came out to dab at the reddened eyes, did that old lady still live when Isabel’s own mother was gone? Why was her father, the rotten orange smell of Scotch on his breath as he clutched her and sobbed, why was he still alive? The old priest, the one who had baptized her, why was he doddering over to give her another blessing when her mother was already decomposing in the huge gilt coffin sliding into the back of the hearse?
Isabel pushed herself up from the floor, blew her nose and wiped her eyes. The first day of school was over. She called Mrs. Thomas a taxi.
†
Isabel walked home in the deepening dusk. People were moving through their houses, some heads bent over dinner, others watching television. The early darkness caught them unaware. They weren’t yet in the wintertime habit of closing the drapes. A door opened somewhere and a man whistled for a dog. Behind him, music floated into the street, a woman singing some high sad song. She stopped to listen, her heart opening to the music’s sorrow, thinking she should check in on Mrs. Thomas and make sure she’d got home okay. Her garden was beautiful, but the house was a death trap.
That night, twenty years ago, she’d looked in through the window and seen the old woman looking right back at her from between tilting piles of junk: papers, magazines, dolls, racks of clothes, jars of home preserves, and dusty plants climbing everywhere. A path just wide enough for her hips, the window almost blocked. She’d shaken her head in what looked like disapproval.
Isabel went the long way around, avoiding the inevitable invitations from the smokers sitting at the tables on the sidewalk outside the Imperial Hotel. She crossed through the playground of the elementary school where she and later all three of her kids had gone. She’d dreamed once of being a teacher and decorating a classroom with bright construction paper cut-outs and dangling mobiles. Of wearing pretty dresses and bright jewellery to welcome the little ones back to school each year.
She kept going past the liquor store, the grocery story and across Main Street until the cross on St. Mary’s appeared. It had been years since she’d walked here, years since she’d pushed Janna in her stroller at least once a week, the boys trailing behind, down the street in front of the church, the school, and the rectory. Dawdling until the old priest came out and climbed into the same car she’d ridden in a dozen times, to a dozen secret places. Forcing the old bastard to stop as she walked across his path and looked him in the eye. She hated him, but it wasn’t until he left that she realized how much it meant to her that at least one other person in this town knew where Janna came from.
She turned and forced herself to pass the school, bright with “welcome back” posters and balloons. She cut across the parking lot, walked around the corner of the rectory, and stopped. For a moment she didn’t know where she was. She turned, scanning the nearby houses, wondering at the small square of tilled soil littered with bright tatters of flower petals and ragged stems. Shards of glass glinted in the last rays of light. Then she realized she was looking at all that was left of Lily Thomas’s place. The house was gone but for a few splinters of wood and shattered Mason jars. The garden, obliterated. She cried out and knelt there, her fingers deep in the dirt that was still warm from the heat of the day.
Where had they moved her? Her mind drifted around the vague mental map she had of the town. Pleasant Haven. Those small rooms and the halls smelling of urine. No wonder she’d fallen asleep in the store. After all those years in her own place, safe behind a wall of things, safe in the jungle of her garden. Things that would breathe in the night around her.
Isabel worked her fingers through the soil, careful of the glass, until she found what she was looking for. A brown fragment — a dahlia tuber. She kept looking until she had a dozen in her pocket. She couldn’t seem to stop. She gathered seeds, roots, anything that looked like it might harbour life, stuffed her pockets, filled her purse with dirt. She was furious at the waste. Lily Thomas’s plants held so much knowledge about what it took to survive through the long winters and the treacherous summers, knowledge that shouldn’t be lost.
It was dark when she stumbled to her feet. A light clicked on in the priest’s bedroom. A man moved across the room, opened the closet door, and picked out a shirt. He threw it on the bed and turned toward her, unbuttoning the one he was wearing. All those years, all those priests, staring out the window, unseeing. Those beautiful dahlias, wasted. Such rage jolted through Isabel that one hand closed around a stone the bulldozer had turned up. It was cold and heavy, rough with dirt. Her arm drew back as if some powerful force had formed its own intent, and flung the rock toward the light shining on the man’s face. She was already running when the glass shattered behind her.
2
Wasps, he thought, curled tight into greyness. Wasps, stinging him. He was bound and blind in a paper nest, and they were stinging him. As he tried to cry out, the paper squeezed tighter and filled his open mouth. He struggled, but his arms were bound to his sides, his legs tight against each other. The pain grew stronger. He choked and flailed, his fist suddenly breaking through. A hand on his shoulder, holding him. He froze.
“Hey, buddy.”
English. Álvaro sputtered and gulped great breaths of air. Diesel and the man’s tired crumpled shirt smell.
“Wake up. You’re here.”
Álvaro cowered, eyes down. The man’s pants were the grey of a wasp’s nest.
“Come on.” The hand slipped under his arm, tugging. Álvaro hunched down further, covering the back of his head with his hands. The man’s black shoes glinted in the darkness below. He pulled his feet up out of their reach, the pain like knives in his knees, and waited for a blow.
The man turned at the sound of a voice, released his arm, and walked away down a long tunnel toward a distant light.
Slowly unclenching his body, Álvaro set his feet back on the floor and let his head fall back against the dark softness. A big chair, the upholstery swirling in blue and grey lines just visible in the dimness. A bus. A bus at night. He looked around. Behind him, the shadows of empty seats. Across the aisle, a crumpled paper bag and cup. Outside his own window, orange light illuminated a deserted parking lot. In small red letters on the windowsill, instructions on how to open the emergency exit. The man had disappeared, but he would be back and Álvaro did not want to be trapped. He was fumbling with the window latch when the lights flickered on. A man called out. A different man. He called Álvaro’s name.
Huddling now against the half-open window, Álvaro prepared to fling himself out. He could not let them catch him again.
“Welcome,” the man sang in clumsy Spanish. Tall and ungainly in flapping tan pants and a red windbreaker, he walked toward Álvaro, arms outstretched. Light hair and eyes. “Welcome to Vancouver.”
Álvaro let the w
indow fall shut and slumped against it. His hand felt for the rosary in his pocket. He remembered now. He had, himself, called from the Seattle bus depot and told the priests what bus he’d be on. It felt like a hundred thousand years ago, but the Oblate community of St. Paul’s Province here in British Columbia had been his first home as a priest and it was to its refuge he had been invited. He was, for the moment, safe.
He reached out to the hand coming to take his, the hand that pulled him into an embrace he could hardly bear, the grey paper suffocating him again. He began to list the names as he had been doing for months now, and he started as he always did with Ana Elisabeth. Ana Elisabeth Yax, Moises Osorio, Juan Tzul, Armand Guzman, Emilia Estuardo, Marta Barillas, and Lucía Madriela — the quiet music of their names drew all his concentration. But even as he muttered the soft cadences he was unsure. He was always unsure as he came to the end — had he missed anyone? He looked up to the pale blue eyes.
“What a time you’ve had of it, Al.”
He couldn’t control his wince at the hand clapping his back.
“Thank the Lord you’re here in one piece. Now come on. It’s late and you must be wanting to stretch your legs.”
Álvaro followed the man to the front of the bus. He nodded to the driver and apologized.
“No trouble at all, Father, no trouble at all.”
He helped him down the stairs and Álvaro hurried after the red windbreaker. He struggled to remember the man’s name as they collected his small bag inside the bus station.
“Shall we walk?” the man asked in Spanish. “It’s not far and I thought you’d need a stretch.”
The words echoed in his head like pain. “No Spanish.” He tried to make it sound like a joke. “I need to get my English back.” And because the other man so obviously preferred it, he agreed to walk even though his knees were swollen and his feet burning. It had been over twenty years since he’d been in Vancouver and the walk would give him time to reclaim some memory of this place. Of this man.
In the darkness under the trees across from the station, the sweet smell of rain cut him adrift; he paused and closed his eyes trying to identify one familiar scent stirring in hidden flowers, in the water on the pavement, in the exhaust of the cars passing under the streetlights.
“Over this way.” The hand on him again, directing him to a path through a circle of rain-soaked benches; the water shimmered and fractured in the passing headlights.
“Friend,” he said, “you need to tell me your name.” The man’s eyes surprised, hurt. His other hand on the man’s wrist. “Please forgive me. I have been gone a long time.”
His suitcase bumping between them, Álvaro listened as they walked under overpasses of streaming cars, past chain-link fences and people ducked into doorways. George told him about the novitiate year he’d spent in Winnipeg, working with Álvaro. He told him about the parish in the centre of the city, the kids they’d rescued, the ones they’d lost. The Ukrainian feasts. The Indian funerals. And then the waves of Central American refugees and the Spanish lessons.
“Winnipeg’s where they were going to send you,” he said, “but we thought we could do a better job with you. There are some good programs here.”
A fat woman, lips swollen and bruised, sucked on a cigarette outside a doorway. George greeted her and moved on.
“Where you going in such a hurry, honey?” she asked Álvaro.
The way the flesh sagged under her pitted skin distressed him. The cut on her mouth.
“I’m with him,” he said.
The woman laughed, derisive, and called out to a car slowing beside the curb.
Álvaro’s distress for the woman propelled his exhausted body around a corner onto a street of red banners and gold letters. Strange vegetables shimmered behind the bars covering the shop windows. It carried him past the stores and into the dimness of side streets. It carried him until, just ahead, he saw a large brick building illuminated in the bright beam of a spotlight behind a chain-link fence. Acid flooded his mouth with saliva. He tried to swallow it. He tried to keep walking. But he could not follow George through the gate in the fence, and he could not call out as George walked on, chattering into the quiet night. He stepped into the shadow of a tree and retched. The vomit from his empty stomach came up thin and sour and splattered on an exposed root.
He was a boy back in his village in Guatemala, hiding with Vinicio, surrounded by the night sounds of the mountains, the wind in the leaves, the bright moon, and watching the men gathered to prepare the corn for planting. Wanting to be in the house with them for the corn seed vigil, afraid to be out in the night with Vinicio, who didn’t know how to behave properly. Who laughed at the rituals. Laughed at the men when they stepped out to piss into the darkness beyond the light filtering from the open door. The old one looking right in their direction and calling the mountain god by his saint’s name. The owl hooting from the tree above their heads sent the boys crashing away through the thick brush, Vinicio never more angry than when he was afraid.
The fat brown root glittering from his vomit uncoiled itself into a snake, the mountain’s anger unleashed, uncoiling higher and higher until the whole tree became the body of the snake, hissing. He backed away, terrified, and ran toward the lights of Chinatown, toward what little traffic there was. He heard George yelling after him but didn’t stop until his way was blocked by a Chinese family arguing outside a restaurant. He hovered nearby, hoping for some safety in their presence. They shifted away from him, still yelling at each other. A child looked up at him, eyes huge. He cried out. Her eyes slanted like the one they’d named Emilia, her dying body wrapped in blue plastic and tipped into a ravine. Her eyes, scrubbed clean of makeup, opened only long enough to look at him with this same fear as he blessed her passing. The old prayers still rising like comforting breath even when he raged against them. His stomach lurched again and he turned away, not wanting to scare the little girl.
“Al, what happened?” George’s pale face blotched in red streaks. He reached out to take his shoulder. Álvaro twisted away.
“Don’t touch me!” His breath was ragged, his mouth full of paper. The family hurried away.
“What’s happening?” George’s hair was wet, his jacket streaked with what was now a proper rain.
Álvaro explained as if to a child that he must not be touched suddenly. That certain buildings frightened him. Brick. Fences. As he spoke, Álvaro’s panic leaked away. George led him into the bright red and golden restaurant, ordered tea and went to phone. Álvaro hunched over the white pot, his hands wrapped around it for warmth. It wasn’t until George returned that he realized he’d burnt his fingers. They were red and sore as he struggled to lift the small cup to his lips. The surface of the green liquid cracked and shivered with his trembling. Like water during an earthquake. The cup of water on the table in his mother’s house, its surface fractured, a mirror to the plaster cracking in the ceiling.
Álvaro tried to talk himself into calmness. He was safe here. There was a house prepared to take him in where he could live quietly and help some of the older priests with their chores. There would be no reminders, fewer triggers to his relapses. He just needed to give himself time. He was tired and the bus trip had been difficult. He thought he’d left fear behind when he crossed the Guatemalan border into Mexico. But at the American border, the man driving him had been turned back, forcing Álvaro to take the bus across alone. By the time immigration was through with his Canadian passport, the stiff new pages were bent and dog-eared and so were his defences. The remainder of his journey turned into a long hungry hallucination north. He dozed sitting up, in and out of nightmare. It was worse when he slept. Coming awake into normal sleepy confusion, the holiday feeling of a bus trip made him smile and then the memories slipped through. The razor and Ana Elisabeth. The electric current opening incandescent lines of pain. The smell of the morgue. One kind woman had given him something for the nausea but it had dropped him into a terrifying sleep of remembe
ring. He’d woken screaming. The bus driver had been ready to throw him off, but the small Indian woman sitting beside him had slipped him a pamphlet. El Corazón de Jesús. Llamada de Emergencia. Oración para una grave necesidad. He stared at the picture of the heart, a bright light under Jesus’s parted robe, thinking a prayer to St. Jude might be better. Cases despaired of.
She’d stayed beside him until she got off in Los Angeles. An accompaniment, he realized as she showed him where the bus north waited. He whispered his thanks, and she’d hoisted her packages to her head to trudge out into the city, unmet, alone, the flimsy papers that gave her passage tucked inside her huipil. It had only been a few years since he had accompanied busloads of campesinos going in the other direction, returning to homes they’d fled in terror. Hundreds came out to slap the bus’s hot metal, to shake the hands extended through the open windows. He’d given what comfort he could to women returning to reclaim the hillsides where their men had been shot. The villages where their children had been hacked to death with machetes. Their sisters and mothers and daughters raped. Burned alive. He should, he told himself, be able to sit quietly on a bus taking him away from those hillsides. Away from those windowless rooms and rain-soaked courtyards.
And he did. Somehow he had lived through the next thirty-six hours, through the progressive cleanliness of the washrooms and the sparkling fast food places where he had looked hopelessly at the menus and walked out again. He had managed to change buses in Seattle and phone the number where the woman who answered seemed to know him. He kept his eyes shut and his fingers on the rosary in his pocket as they crossed the border into Canada. Safe at last, he’d thought, and let down his guard to fall asleep for the ride into Vancouver. To be met by this fool who dragged him through the rain, chattering like a tour guide. As if he were on some nostalgic journey into his past. He slurped the tea until the taxi came.
The Taste of Ashes Page 2
