The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  Doesn’t she know it’s November? That the ground is usually frozen solid by now, usually covered with a foot of snow? Doesn’t she remember where she comes from? The spurt of anger subsided when she saw the white envelope under the bulbs. Her name, Isabel, in the same tiny letters. The little drawing of a bell at the end — their joke. “My mom is a bell.”

  The card showed an English garden, a riot of colours tumbling over a stone wall, a cottage covered in roses. A figure with a straw hat bent over a hoe in a profusion of red and blue flowers, impossible to say what kind. Happy birthday, Mom. Hope it’s not too late for these — Amy sends her love. Janna. Amy? How had they run into each other? She put her little finger on the period between love and Janna. She rubbed at it until it blurred into a purple smudge. The anger bubbled back up through the sorrow. This is ridiculous, she thought. This politeness. She didn’t know where her daughter lived, didn’t have her address or her phone number.

  The puppy tumbled at her feet, chewing at the chips that had fallen to the floor. Still angry, she bent to his mouth and roughly scraped the fragments out from between his teeth. Scooping up the hot mess, she dropped it in the garbage. The puppy skipped along beside her, jumping up and barking. What was that thing with the knee Trevor had showed her — whump! Over went the dog, sliding on the clean linoleum and she was instantly remorseful. She bent to stroke his long silky red coat and noted the black lines around his eyes, how the ears had long tassels, and how the tail flopped on the floor. She put her face in his neck as he squirmed and wriggled under her grasp. Janna would love this dog. She would love the way he smelled of the outside, the frost sinking into the ground, the willow leaves blackening on the grass. She stroked the length of his back. When he wriggled himself right over, legs in the air, tail flopping, she reached down to scratch his pink belly with its dark spots, avoiding the little fur-covered sheath with the wisp of hair at the end and the tender flaps of skin at the junction of his hind legs and groin.

  “If I’m going to plant those damn bulbs, we’re going to have to dig to China to find a piece of ground that is not frozen,” she said to the dog. “But we’ll have to wait until the sun warms things up a bit. Now, can you help me put these dishes away?”

  The dog wriggled happily.

  †

  Isabel was crouched in a flowerbed on the east side of the house, a trench already dug, when Soryada found her. The overturned dirt was pale with ice crystals, but a couple of inches deeper, it was still unfrozen. As if with some premonition of the cold snowless fall, Isabel had lifted all her dahlia tubers from this bed back in September and stored them with the remnants of Elly Thomas’s garden. If the tulips actually survived, she didn’t know where she’d put the dahlias — maybe right on top. The puppy, tethered to the fence a few yards away, yelped to see Soryada.

  “Ah, mi cachorro,” she said, tickling the dog.

  “What’s that you called him?”

  “El cachorro. It’s puppy in Spanish.” She rolled out the rrrs. “El cachorrrrro.” She brushed the willow leaves from his fur. “I’m going to miss him.”

  They’d found him tied to their mailbox, twenty miles up the Kispiox road, skinny like the dogs at home, she said. Soryada scratched and stroked the puppy until he settled down at her feet, eyes closed, ears flopped right back. Isabel set the bulbs deep into the trench in clusters of four.

  “You must be a very special gardener to grow something now, in this cold,” Soryada said. “I have never seen this before — the trees with no leaves, everything dead. Trevor has told me it all comes back.” She paused. “But aren’t you afraid?”

  Isabel had never heard her say as much at one time. She tried to think of an answer as she filled in the trench. She looked around at the heavy mulches of fallen leaves she scrounged from all her neighbours’ rakings, the straw piled on the asparagus bed, the grey dirt of the tilled vegetable plot, and the burlap around the little cypresses. The red berries of the mountain ash echoed the red leaves of the stonecrop over in the rockery. She saw it all as latent, expectant. A child tucked into a bed, the covers pulled up over her head. A pregnant woman. The winter, a time to rest and dream.

  “It doesn’t all come back. Some winters kill perennials that have thrived for years. But then again, some plants you don’t hold out any hope for, things you planted on a whim, well, they surprise you. You just never know.”

  “It’s not for selling, the things you grow? Or for eating?”

  “I grow some food.” Isabel paused, unable to explain why she grew such a big garden, why she wanted to make dahlias bloom in difficult places, why she struggled every year with her clematis, the Markham’s Pink and the new breeds coming out of Poland, ones people said wouldn’t survive more than a lucky season or two. It had something to do with her mother, she knew. And her bare feet in Mrs. Thomas’s dahlias.

  Stretching the stiffness out of her back and hips, she clipped the leash on Perro, and wrapped her scarf around her ears. “Let’s take this boy to have a look around town,” she said and led Soryada through the little trail across the alley to the town’s perimeter trail. The bitter smell of ripe cranberries hung in the air, the leaves crispy underfoot. The dog was ecstatic.

  “I hope you’re here in the summer — you’ll see how beautiful it is. Maybe then you’ll understand.”

  Isabel regretted her words when she saw the shadow cross Soryada’s face. Six months was all she legally had. After that, things got complicated. Friendship was something she guarded against with Trevor’s girlfriends. They came and went between each drilling season. There hadn’t been any so far who measured up to the expectations of his Gitxsan family. Or who wanted to try.

  “I’m used to this,” she said gesturing to the clumps of nettles and horsetails sagging along the edges of the path. “I can’t imagine a place like Mexico. Is it green all the time?”

  “In the rainy season, yes. Then in the dry season, it can get very brown. But the days don’t get short like this, and it doesn’t get cold.”

  There’s something about walking conversations, Isabel thought. You say things you wouldn’t say if you were looking at each other across a room. As they walked down to the river, they took turns with the leash and talked like two women who had known each other a long time.

  “Your Trevor, he speaks pretty good, what we call cowboy Spanish. But I want to improve my English.”

  “It sounds good to me.”

  “We get lots of practice in the camps. Not many of the Canadians speak Spanish. Only enough to get a drink and a woman.”

  Soryada hesitated, waiting for a group of joggers to pass. Isabel nodded good morning.

  “For many girls,” Soryada continued, “the dream is to get an American to bring you north. Even if you don’t get married, you want to see what it’s like.” Soryada hugged Isabel’s arm. “I always said I didn’t want that, that I wanted to get back to my country, not get further away from it. But Trevor, he looks like the men from my village. Something about the way he sits, with one foot always up on something. A log or a tire. His hat tipped a little bit sideways. Sometimes I look at him and I think I’m home.” She laughed. “Until he opens his mouth and that big fat English comes out.”

  Isabel was still trying to make out what Soryada had said. “Back to your country?”

  “I am from Guatemala.”

  Isabel nodded, unwilling to ask where exactly is Guatemala? The pause stretched into a companionable silence as the women and the dog walked down to the river. The surrounding mountains were holding back more and more water as the temperature dropped, and the river had shrunk into the centre of its bed. They walked across the big sandy flats the low water exposed, sand whose warmth Isabel remembered. She admitted to Soryada that as the year squeezed toward the wasp waist of December, in this time before the snow covered everything, it did get harder and harder to remember how green the land could be, how warm and welcoming the sand felt to bare feet in the summer.

  As they ca
me full circle to climb the hill back up from the river, Soryada spoke again, her voice quiet. She told Isabel what she could remember of her mother bundling up the tortillas still hot from the fire in her tzute and pushing her out the window as soldiers broke through the door. Her eyes, fierce and angry, her voice yelling to run, run. Her voice like a hand coming to strike her daughter, to force her to keep running even as she could hardly breathe for crying.

  Soryada stopped on the sidewalk of one of the quiet streets of the subdivision with its pale houses, the neat lawns soft with melted frost, the shiny trucks parked under basketball hoops.

  “In the middle of one word, her voice choked off, and I fell to the ground as if I had been choked too. I looked back. A man leaned out the window, his rifle aimed at me. He was laughing. I rolled under some bushes before he fired. As I ran down into a ravine, I was mad at my mother. She must have done something, I thought, to upset the soldiers.”

  Soryada’s thick braid caught the sun as she crouched to pick up Perro. The dog snuggled into her shoulder as she told Isabel how she hid up in the hills, hearing the rifles and watching the smoke rise up from her village. She hid alone, crouched down in the bush. She ate the tortillas and wrapped herself in the tzute that still smelled of her mother.

  “Those hills,” she said, “they were full of people. I hid three days until strangers found me asleep, all curled up like this tired puppy. They took me with them across the ridges to a place where they said the soldiers would not come. I didn’t know we were in Mexico. The sisters came there and asked me if I’d like to go to school. I said yes and they took me to the orphanage where I learned to read and write. Spanish and English. And they taught us how to cook.”

  “Your mother?” Isabel was afraid of the answer.

  Soryada sounded matter-of-fact. “If she was alive, she would have found me.”

  Isabel stood behind Soryada as they waited at the stoplight to cross the highway, stroking the dog’s tired head where it rested on Soryada’s shoulder, sleepy eyes looking back at her, nose nestled against Soryada’s braid. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  The light changed and the girl nodded, shifting the dog to her other shoulder. She carried him all the way to the back door of Isabel’s house.

  Trevor was in the kitchen, beating eggs.

  “Breakfast?” he asked.

  “Just coffee for me,” Isabel answered as Soryada showed her how to rub the puppy down with a rag and helped her pick a spot for his basket and blanket. The dog slurped water from his bowl, splashing the floor and Isabel’s leg, flopped into his basket, and fell asleep.

  Soryada opened the drapes in the living room and stripped the pullout bed while Isabel rummaged in the cupboard under the TV. She brought an old school atlas into the kitchen and opened it on the table as Trevor ate his steady way through a huge breakfast. She found Mexico, a green tail on the big yellow United States.

  “Show me where the camp was.”

  Trevor leaned over and pointed to a spot in the southwest part of Mexico. “About here.”

  “And where is Guatemala?”

  Trevor pointed to the irregular block; it was blue, immediately south of Mexico. He peered closer. “We drove down here one weekend. One of the guys wanted to see the volcano. What was it, the highest in Central America? A Godawful highway.”

  “Tajumulco,” Soryada said.

  “Didn’t see much. It was socked in.”

  “Covered in clouds,” Isabel explained to Soryada. She traced her finger over the map. “I knew a man from somewhere down here once.”

  Trevor got up from the table and carried his plate to the sink. “Mom, you knew a man from just about everywhere, once.”

  “I can’t remember which country. I think it ended in an a.”

  Soryada laughed, her finger tapping from north to south on the map’s bright colours. “Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia!”

  “Where is your village?”

  “Was,” said Soryada, peering over the map. She pointed. “Somewhere in here. I remember people talking about Nebaj,” one finger pointed, “and Huehuetenango.” She looked up at Isabel. “But when I asked about going home, the nuns told me my village is gone. There’s nothing to go back to. But I still want to go. There must be someone who knows me.”

  Trevor came up behind her and kissed the top of her head. Isabel slipped out of the room. She felt cold and went upstairs to see if she could find the sweater she wanted. It had been her mother’s. A cardigan of dusty pink wool with white buttons shaped like little hens. The wool had lost its resilience, but the sweater was still in good shape. She pulled it on and slid each hen carefully through the embroidered buttonholes.

  Isabel had aunts and uncles and cousins working in half the offices and stores in town. There were times when she would have happily drowned them all, just to get her mother back. Just to sit her down and make her a cup of tea. Ask her what to say when Janna’s voice filled with the same longing Isabel had heard in Soryada’s. There’s got to be someone to tell me who my father is, Janna had said to Isabel, who’d already turned away from her questions. Turned away until Janna’s longing turning to venom. Maybe she’d put an ad in the fucking paper asking all the likely prospects to volunteer for DNA testing, she’d said. Isabel had almost told her then. Probably should have. What a mess — one that grew and grew until it seemed that whatever she did would only make things worse.

  Doors opened and closed downstairs. Water ran in the kitchen sink. Isabel sat in the rocking chair under the small bedroom window and watched the sun shine on the mountain. Its short November arc was more than halfway drawn and it would sink soon behind the south shoulder.

  There were so many people in the world, so many places, she thought, why did it matter where any of us came from? Childhood friends didn’t really know us any better than strangers did. No matter how much we joked with our uncles, tried on clothes for our aunties, played hide and seek on long summer evenings with our cousins, or whispered secrets into our lover’s hair, we each came out of some dark unknowing that was never fully illuminated. Even our own children. Isabel imagined Trevor and Jason and Janna shining and turning like bubbles floating into sunlight. What recipe of genes and geography made up the sad residue that would be left when her own bubble burst? A little smear of liquid on the grass.

  Isabel pushed herself out of the rocking chair, feeling the ache in her hips from the long walk. She started down the stairs. Before she lost her courage, she’d ask Trevor for Janna’s phone number.

  8

  “Eloise says you’ve refused further counselling.”

  Álvaro swivelled his chair around. A tall woman, grey hair swept up under a bright woolen cap, toucan earrings dangling against a pale face, stood in the doorway of the tiny office, her arms piled with rolls of paper. Glasses dangled on her chest, tangled in a rosary of black jet. He struggled to place her.

  “Margaret Coleman, Eloise’s sister.”

  One of the main funders for his street kids project in Guatemala City. He faithfully sent photos of the kids at his school and asked for prayers on their behalf. Prayers for the ones who had died. She had written back words of encouragement and thanks. They’d never met. He rose to shake her hand.

  “I’m so sorry about your troubles.”

  He tried not to squirm as she looked him over. He’d taken to wearing black T-shirts and jeans. Clothes that moved with his body, not ones that slid over his skin. His arms, bulked up from the gym, were unmarked, except for the remnant scars at his wrists. His watch covered one. On the other he wore a woven band, the quetzal picked out in tiny stitches.

  “What do they have you doing here?”

  “Translations. Stories for the website, the newsletters. Reports for the governments in the Latin countries where they have kids’ shelters. Fundraising.”

  “Covenant House has always been very good at fundraising.” She looked at the posters of black kids playing basketball and
Indian girls bent over notebooks. “Eloise is worried about you out there in that gloomy house smelling of pot roast. All those old men, then coming down to these sad stories. Not to mention the rain we’ve been having.” She shifted the rolls under one arm. “It’s been seventeen days in a row, rain every day. The city feels like it’s rotting.”

  “She worries too much.”

  One hand reached out to touch his hat. “These little watch caps are all the rage these days.”

  He couldn’t control the flinch. She pretended not to notice even as she pulled back her hand. “I’ll have to get one for my son.”

  She turned to go, fumbling with her papers. He jumped to catch the ones she dropped. Offered to help carry them upstairs. While they climbed, she told him who they’d found to take over his school in Guatemala City and that the children missed him and sent their best wishes. It wasn’t until they were standing outside a door labelled Art Therapy that Álvaro guessed what she was up to.

  He spoke to her back as she unlocked the door. “It’s best for those kids that I’m far away from them. But talking about what happened isn’t any good. I basically need to pound on something pretty much every day. Since the old men at the provincial house aren’t really suitable targets and the furniture doesn’t belong to me, I go to the gym.”

  She opened the door. “Who have you talked to?”

  “They sent me to a psychiatrist who wrote some prescriptions. Then a post traumatic stress group.” The room heavy with smoke, the walls covered with affirmation statements. The sad stories of car accidents, flesh sizzling in house fires, the rapist coming through the window. He had been unable to add his story to their misery.

  He looked past her into the big room, full of watery afternoon light. “Have they sent you to convince me to try this?”