The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  “Give me your comb,” Janna ordered. She zigged and zagged the straight part and messed it up a little at the back. Pulling two bobby pins out of her pocket, she pinned Amy’s short bangs back. “Now take these out.” She pointed to the nose ring, two eyebrow rings, and five studs up one ear. “Leave in these,” — the two high on her ear and a little one down on the lobe — “and have a look.”

  Amy was delighted. “You are so like Isabel,” she laughed, undoing the bottom button of the little shirt so her belly showed.

  “It’s about the only thing we have in common, my mom and me. Stuff that really matters. Clothes.”

  Amy ignored Janna’s sarcasm. She put one foot forward and turned her hip out. “Who am I?”

  Janna handed her the pack. “Put this on and you’ll be perfect.”

  The clerk applauded as Amy completed the transformation into a slightly overweight and sexually eager business student.

  “But it will be useless for Halloween. No one’ll know you’re in costume.”

  Amy staggered on the platform heels, laughing. “You’re right. This is a disguise.”

  “A costume?” the clerk said. She dragged them over to a rack of sequins, glitter, and red velvet. A plush leopard skin coat. “Get a blond Marilyn wig, this coat, and butterfly glasses with little diamonds in the tips.”

  “And I’ll bet you carry butterfly glasses,” Janna said.

  The clerk pointed.

  “I can never think of leopard skin as sexy,” Amy said. “Not after that year I worked at your mom’s store.”

  That was when she first heard Amy’s name. Through those last weeks at home, Janna’s mom had kept talking about this crazy kid, about how much she liked her. The night Janna walked out, she’d said Amy could have her room. Screamed it.

  “We carried extra size leopard skin nighties. Mrs. Dankley came in looking for something sexy to wear for her second honeymoon.”

  Mrs. Dankley, a very large woman, had been a janitor at the high school.

  “We found her stretched out on the floor of the change room. She couldn’t get up without our help because she was afraid she’d rip the nightgown. We asked her what she was doing down there and she said she needed to try it lying down. We should provide couches, she said. How could you tell how a nightie would feel unless you lay down?”

  Amy threaded her rings back into their various holes as the clerk and Janna tried to stop laughing. “Even the living felines themselves have never looked the same since that day.”

  Maybe it was the release of laughter that made Janna speak. Or the sudden longing for the familiarity of home. A place where she wasn’t invisible.

  “Forget Halloween,” she said. “You can put your little water pistol in there,” she pointed to the pack, “and you’ll be all ready to crash the globalization seminar. Just do me a favour and don’t sit beside me.”

  Amy stared at her. “Is that one of your classes?” She clapped her hands like a child. “Too cool.” Without bothering to close the curtain on the change room, she peeled off the clothes and tossed them to the clerk. “Ring those up for me, will you? A business expense, I think.”

  As Janna watched her pull on her skirt, layer the shirts and vests, take the bobby pins out of her hair and twist it up into a couple of pig tails, she envied Amy even as she disdained the roll of fat at her waist, the thickness of her thighs, and the loose elastic in her panties. Imagine not caring.

  †

  Janna walked back to residence through the grounds of the First Nations House of Learning. She liked the way they’d tried to reconstruct the bush: river stones piled in a little wild and weedy area beside a manufactured waterfall. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine playing tag in among the totem poles in Kispiox, down by the river, the sound of water always in the background. She used to go there with her brother, Trevor, whose father was Gitxsan. Maybe she was too, she’d say. She tried to understand the language the older women spoke and loved the orderliness of the smokehouse, red filaments of salmon hanging in neat rows, all facing upstream so their spirits could continue where their bodies could no longer go. No, the women had said. They’d know if one of their boys had any hand in her making and there’d be half a dozen aunties on Isabel’s doorstep claiming ownership and jurisdiction.

  No one had ever come, she reminded herself as she walked through the trees to her residence. A counsellor once had offered to approach her mother about what she called her identity issues. Janna didn’t realize she’d snorted right out loud at the memory until one of the smokers sitting outside the residence door on a disintegrating lawn chair said, What? She waved him off, laughing. She already had one parent she wished she didn’t; what if her father was a dud too? What if she got all her DNA from losers?

  It didn’t have to mean she’d be one too, she told herself. Look at Amy — she wasn’t anything like her mom. And they probably didn’t get along either — after all, she’d stayed with Isabel last summer, not with her own mom. Maybe they could trade mothers, she thought, staring at the smoker bending to butt out his cigarette in the metal bucket under his chair. She held the door open as he came in behind her. His name was Benny, he said. What was hers?

  4

  When Isabel was a girl, her family connections meant something. Her grandfather was a Bulkley Valley hotel owner who had started business back in 1912 running a roadhouse and pack train operation on the old telegraph trail through northwestern BC. He’d expanded by opening small hotels and liquor establishments in the new towns that grew along the railway between Prince George and Prince Rupert. He’d helped out many settlers by giving them a few dollars for their farms so they could get the hell out of the north and then rented the farms out until land prices went up to make a sale worth his while. He grubstaked prospectors and gyppo sawmill operators, a sideline that made good use of his only son’s enormous physical energy. At the logger sports, David Lee would compete for the Bull of the Woods prize with the same men who cut the timber for his mills and then use his winnings to buy them all drinks at the family hotels his sisters ran.

  He was skating across Lake Kathlyn to a Christmas party in 1951 when he spotted Catherine Black lacing on her skates at the edge of the lake. She came from a Prince Rupert family that had financed the railway that underpinned the Lee family money. Her grandfather had built himself a log house on the small lake near Smithers where prosperous Prince Rupert families escaped the coastal fogs to get a little heat in the summer and snow in the winter. Dave insisted he accompany Catherine around the lake to her home because he’d just missed stumbling into a newly opened crack out in the middle. Whether or not the crack truly existed depended upon who told the story, but his strategy worked because they were married within a year and Isabel came along the next.

  Until her mother was hospitalized the first time, Isabel grew up in the midst of a welcoming network of aunts, uncles, and cousins who gathered in large lakeside houses, ski hill cabins, Babine Lake fishing lodges, and the big Lee family home up on the hill above town or the Black summer lakeside home that had been given to her parents when she was born. It wasn’t Vancouver posh by any means, but there were always cars and boats and ski passes and lots of food and liquor. Favours given and favours returned, children moving in packs from place to place. But during the two years her mother struggled to stay alive, Isabel separated herself from them all; she couldn’t stand their pity. She hated the way the men insinuated themselves into a house that had a man in need of consolation and no wife to keep them in line. By the time Catherine Black Lee died on New Year’s Day in 1969, Dave Lee had sold the family sawmill to the big industrial mills and Isabel was looking for her own consolation in all the wrong places. At the funeral, she stood her ground, silent and raging in her stiff black dress, her hair twisted back so tightly the tears couldn’t leak out, as the priest droned on about God’s will, patting her shoulder until she screamed at him not to touch her and slapped his hand so hard it flapped back into his own face. T
he beginning of her long withdrawal from the family.

  A couple of decades later, none of that history mattered except to the old families themselves. And hardly even to them. So it amused Isabel to find her local knowledge in demand. Instead of gathering for Thanksgiving at the family cabins out at Babine Lake, here she was hefting bales of straw up to a young woman, Jasmine, standing in the back of a pickup pulled up beside an old barn. She was explaining that the straw stacked behind two antique trucks and dusty stage sets abandoned by a defunct amateur theatre group had likely been baled by one of Isabel’s uncles twenty or thirty years ago.

  “It was a family legend how my grandfather, old man Lee, conned the Indians out of about three quarter-sections up this way,” she said. “That tack shed down by the creek used to be theirs, and they’d come out every fall to take a few trout. My aunt, when she brought her new husband out here to live, put an end to that. The Indians acted like they owned the place, she used to say.”

  After her aunt and uncle sold out to a German professor, the place moved through the hands of a series of ever more grandiose and doomed dreamers who built experimental living quarters that included a geodesic dome and a tree house, as well as a more useful group of log cabins. Jasmine and her brother, Frank, bought the place during a real estate slump a couple of years ago that coincided with a boom in the silviculture business their little company was perfectly situated to cash in on. They shared it with an eclectic mix of even more recent arrivals: a social worker, two teachers, and a biologist. They all loved Isabel’s stories about riding with her mother to check on the big herd of cattle that grazed right up into the mountains. How in the winter, they’d drive out once a week to pick up a few bales of hay for the horses they stabled in town. Her mother about Jasmine’s age. The car’s leather seats coated in dust that made them sneeze big whooping joyous explosions. She wasn’t sure if it was a memory of that joy or its loss that sent the next bale barrelling right into Jasmine.

  A hand landed hot on her shoulder, a rumble in her ear. “Don’t overdo it, Isabel, my love. We’ve got more than enough manpower here.”

  She sneezed and stepped out of reach. It was only lately that she’d figured out how to work hard physically. How the discomfort eased if you kept going, slowly, through it. But Frank, Jasmine’s brother, would like nothing better than for her to ask for help. He was older than the others, late thirties, with at least one wife in his past. While the others treated her as a surrogate mother, Frank courted her. The last thing she needed. She always figured it wasn’t the booze, really, that caused her grief; it was drinking in the company of well-built men.

  She walked beside the truck as Jasmine drove down the rutted track toward a small, cultivated field. In the remnant afternoon heat, a rare heat for the second Monday in October, she could smell the girl’s sweat. Light caught the copper hair on her thin muscular arm where it bent at the open window, and her beautiful young breasts bounced under the tie-dyed shirt as she backed to the edge of the dirt. Three men bent over curved plots that radiated out in dark spokes from a centre circle. They were planting garlic, hundreds of cloves of garlic. Three bare backs bent to the work. Isabel swallowed. There was something beautiful about their shoulder blades, the way the shadowed muscles bunched and slid under the skin stretched over the bones. She had to look away.

  The back bumper nudged the fourth man, a skinny kid with a notebook. Isabel looked over his shoulder. He was mapping the garlic plots, marking the names of the different varieties in tiny block letters: Polish White, Music, Siberian, and Elephant. The drawing showed how each of the wedges curved slightly, a path for the planters in between. He had been out first thing in the frosty morning measuring, using string to mark the segments. Alejandro.

  Jasmine nuzzled his neck. “Where do you want the straw, mi amor?”

  “We have four types planted, each split between two plots.” His pencil tapped the drawing. “We’ll mulch one of each, see if it makes a difference.”

  Isabel dumped two bales into the barrow and wheeled them toward the centre of the circle. Splinters of eggshell and other compost fragments speckled the dark soil. She clipped the baling twine on the first bale. The straw expanded with a sigh, like her breasts, she thought, when she unhooked her bra.

  Frank and the others had moved into the old farm the winter after Janna had left home, the winter Isabel had given up booze. She’d also had to give up most of her friends. Watching videos night after night, she’d gotten bloated on popcorn and Pepsi, joined a choir, and tried quilting, but nothing really took. When spring came, she spent more and more time in her garden, trying to recreate memories of her mother. She planted all the old flowers the first settlers found could survive here: delphiniums, sweet William, lupines, yellow clematis, columbines, poppies, bleeding hearts, and forget-me-nots. Thyme, oregano, lavender, mint. And the ones they had to baby: roses, honeysuckle, and dahlias. Trying to create the possibility of another kind of life, the one she’d imagined for herself before her mom died.

  It had been her mother’s sister, Alice, who had suggested Frank ask Isabel to come out to see what was left of the huge rock garden that had been planted at the front of the house, to show them which of the plants were weeds and which were keepers. She had told them what she could and on later visits to help with the garden’s reclamation, she told them more. Most gardening books weren’t much use with the valley’s confusing combination of a short growing season and long hours of summer daylight. Things that shouldn’t grow did; others that should didn’t.

  The kids were mostly vegetarian and rarely drank. They were enthusiastic about her knowledge and she was grateful for the way they included her in spite of her age. They fed her strange food, which she came to like. They brought her heritage seeds and cookies. Their friends slept in Janna’s empty room; some stayed on and made her evenings and weekends easier to struggle through, still sober. And Frank waited, his hair in some lights the same colour as rye whiskey.

  When the planting was finished, Isabel stayed behind while the others piled into the pickup and bounced across the grass toward the old house straddling the top of a small rise. She shrugged on her jacket and felt for the bulbs in her pockets. She walked the curved pathways of the garlic bed, as if to instill their shape into her body’s memory. Every few steps she paused and tucked a cluster of grape hyacinth bulbs into the dirt under the straw. In other spots, scilla. When they lifted off the mulch in April, they would find a curved path of colour and fragrance through the garlic shoots. That was the thing about gardening here. The winters were long enough that by the time the world had turned through a hundred changes and travelled halfway around the sun, you’d forgotten what you’d done in the fall. The spring always surprised you.

  She hoed the fallow dirt in the centre of the plot and planted a circle of her own garlic, a stock that had been grown in the valley for over twenty years, around the edges. In a smaller ring inside, she crammed snowdrops and some tiny narcissus from the old railway restaurant plot.

  She patted the ground down over the bulbs. She scooped out a six-inch hole in the centre of the ring, the soil now cold on her hands. It was almost dark. She pulled a peony root from her pocket, a root that had come from her grandmother’s garden. Lily Thomas had reminded her of the bushes that drenched the back alley behind the grandmother’s house with huge blowsy flowers every June.

  Since the day Isabel found Lily’s house gone, she’d taken to buying the old woman coffee at the A&W, a place she preferred to her tiny room in Pleasant Haven with its north window and a view of a car wash parking lot. They talked about gardening, about how the thirty-year lease the church had given Lily had expired last summer, about the priests she was convinced stole her flowers for their altar. They talked about the huge garden Isabel’s grandmother had created around the house up on the hill above town where Isabel had played every Sunday summer afternoon of her childhood.

  It must have changed hands a dozen times since the old folks had d
ied, but daffodils still lined the front walk and the big linden tree bloomed every summer, its dense foliage muffling the crash of shunting trains at the foot of the mountain. Lily had taken her down the alley, pulled a sharp spade out of the pocket of her pink coat, and told Isabel where in the tangle of escaped raspberry canes to dig for the peony roots.

  Isabel tucked the root into the ground. Before she covered it, she said a prayer for Janna, a prayer to overcome anger. Isabel had felt it in herself when she hugged Janna at her college graduation last spring. She’d felt it in her daughter, the way her pretty face pinched in resistance and her body became an awkward stick that Isabel wanted to shake. She covered the root and prayed that Janna would grow soft, would send out tender shoots, and that she would come home.

  †

  “We’ve found a roomer for you,” Jasmine said, as they sat down to the Thanksgiving feast.

  “Great.” Janna’s room had been empty since Amy had gone back to school and Isabel could use the cash. “Who is she?”

  There was a pause. She looked around the kitchen where all the community members gathered to eat. Right now, they all looked like naughty kids with a secret. Except Frank. He shaking his head.

  “Okay, okay. I give. What’s the joke?”

  They told her about Lance Everett, about his place half a mile back in the bush. No power. No road access in winter. He usually parked his truck at the ranch and snowshoed in and out. A couple of months ago, he’d been badly injured in a car accident. He was out of the hospital, but couldn’t manage the bush.

  “There’s no way I’m having some guy hanging around the house feeling sorry for himself.”

  They said he had a job.

  Isabel hadn’t had the boys live with her for years and didn’t miss the way they filled the house and left chaos behind. She wasn’t going to let a man in to use the toilet while she had a bath and odds were they wouldn’t be laughing together over some movie hunk’s nice butt.