The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  He scrubbed at his hair. “I don’t make promises anymore. But I’m not planning to kill myself.”

  When he saw the relief on Walter’s grey face, what was left of Álvaro’s anger vanished. He jumped up to help him into a chair. The old man crumpled into it, barely denting the cushions, and closed his eyes.

  “I’ll make some tea,” Álvaro offered, waving away George’s offer of help. He groaned when he saw the kitchen. The broken glass, the table smeared with paint. The rumpled sweater on the floor and the whiskey smell. His crude drawings of Isabel’s breasts and thighs. Later, he told himself, and plugged in the kettle.

  When he brought the tea and poured the hot liquid into the mugs, he felt lighter somehow. Unburdened. He spooned sugar into all three mugs and, as soon as he tasted its sweetness, he realized he was starving. He reached for the cookies he’d put on a plate.

  Walter’s hand shook as he brought his cup to his mouth. He set it down again. “Forgive us,” he said.

  George opened his mouth to protest, but Álvaro spoke first. “For all your noise, old man, it’s better than the way the others tiptoe around me. Gentle requests. Sideways looks. Wondering when I’m going to explode.” Álvaro sighed. “There’s always a chasm between us.”

  “Unbridgeable?”

  Álvaro shrugged.

  Walter bent his head for a moment and when he lifted it again there were tears in his eyes.

  Álvaro gestured toward the kitchen. “I know it looks bad in there, but this is helping me. I don’t know why, but it’s different than talking. It’s different even than thinking. It isn’t faith or philosophy. It’s physical action. And you know us Oblates, we’re men of action.”

  Walter tried to smile.

  Álvaro bent to slide a finger into the Christmas tree stand. Dry. Needles were scattered on the rug among the few remnant scraps of wrapping paper he’d meant to clean up. What was it, two, three days ago?

  “There is something you can do for me,” he said, head down, hands busy with the tree.

  “Anything.”

  The women in his life. His mother’s suffering, because of him. Clara. Ana Elisabeth. He had to hope there was one woman to whom he could make reparations.

  “It’s Isabel. Can you find out where she is? How she’s doing?”

  “Isabel?” George asked.

  Walter looked at Álvaro for a long time. He finally nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

  13

  Isabel stood at Alice’s back door, afraid to knock. She gazed out across the brown fields, frozen hard and mean. It was a strange winter. After a few December flurries, the snow had all blown away leaving the whole valley stunned by the first green Christmas in memory. Except it wasn’t green. It was eight-hour days of brown and grey and sixteen-hour cloudy starless nights. It was going to be hell on her perennials.

  The wind finally drove her inside. She opened the door and called out. A muffled hello came from the kitchen. Isabel shook off her jacket in a heap on the bench in the mudroom, stepped out of her boots, and drew a deep breath before opening that door. She was terrified.

  Isabel Lee didn’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. The New Year’s Eve her mother died, Isabel had been at a teenage party, a staggering drunk sixteen-year-old. When they called her to the hospital, she was afraid to go near her mother for fear she’d smell the booze. Afraid to say goodbye and then it was too late. The next year, married and pregnant with Jason, Isabel had sent her teenage husband out to party while she sat in the living room of their tiny apartment and talked to the photo of her mom hung on the kitchen wall. Told her what a fool her daughter was for getting into this pickle.

  Instead of getting dressed up and drinking, she cleaned up and stayed sober. No matter what. She’d sit the kids down on New Year’s Eve day and they’d sort out their unfinished business before the new year began. Quiet apologies, lies confessed, projects finished or officially abandoned. The neighbourhood dogs did well with the freezer-burnt fish and the neighbourhood kids got outgrown toys. They’d clean the house and take down the Christmas tree. They’d cook hot dogs over the bonfire they made of it in the backyard, Isabel would cut their hair and they’d end the year bathed, brushed, and clear-eyed. As the clock ticked toward midnight, they’d talk to Grandma’s picture, telling her about the fish they’d caught or the races they’d won. The new friend at school. Janna drew pictures and tacked them to the wall beside the photo. The grandmother who was younger when she died than Isabel was now.

  “Isabel!” Alice stood in the open door, hair tied back and hands white with flour. The front of her Christmas apron was dusted white. “How’d you get here?”

  Her stomach churning, Isabel grasped her aunt by the shoulders and kissed her once on each cheek. “Alejandro lent me his car,” she said, shivering. “Its heater isn’t working very well.”

  Clucking like a banty hen, Alice pulled her into the kitchen where a kettle steamed on the big old wood range and the south window caught the faint glow of sun behind the high clouds. She sat her at the table and prattled on about how she was finishing up some last pies for the New Year’s dance at the community hall while she made a pot of tea and set out the cups, the honey and milk, and Christmas cookies. She knew something was up. Isabel rarely drove, and never in winter.

  Isabel could not get started. She was afraid this might be the last time Alice would welcome her into her home. She was afraid of losing her. She had taken a taxi out to the airport on Christmas Eve, hearing the cheers go up as the plane landed in spite of the freezing rain pelting the runway. Waiting for the last person to struggle across the slippery tarmac into the warm arrival lounge. No Janna. No phone call. Nothing. She’d called Trevor in tears and he’d come to take her to his place for a few days. Isabel and Soryada both lonely in the midst of his big family. Until one uncle clapped Trevor on the shoulder and announced that the clan would fund a trip to see if he and Soryada could find any of her family down there in Guatemala. Since it looks like you two are going to stick it out, he said.

  When she saw the hope in Soryada’s eyes, Isabel made a decision. If Janna didn’t want contact, Isabel was going to have to figure out how to live with that. But she was going to track down Álvaro and, finally, tell Janna who he was. Where he was. Let her decide.

  Teeth still chattering, Isabel blurted it all out. How she had to set things right with Janna. How she needed to find her father before she told her and that Alice could maybe help her. Alice didn’t falter until Isabel said Álvaro’s name.

  She stared at her niece as if she were a stranger and turned to put wood into the firebox. Ramming a piece through the smoke that billowed out into the room, she swore and rattled the poker. The metal door banged shut and she opened a window, flapping the smoke out with a tea towel.

  “Isabel, sometimes.” Alice was furious. She slammed the window shut.

  “Dad had just died,” Isabel said, desperate. “I’d been ploughing through the mess he left behind and found Mom’s dresses. They made me crazy, like a thirteen-year-old with new breasts.”

  “You’re going to blame a dress? Doesn’t that take the cake?” Alice stood with one hand on the window frame, as if she was evaluating its possibility as an exit. Her mouth was a thin line, the tendons in her neck rigid. “The poor kid. I remember him. He’s about two months ordained, just moved from Mexico City to this completely unfamiliar place, trying to make sense of us all. And here comes sweet little Isabel, ready for redemption.”

  “Do you have any idea how many priests screw around?” Isabel cried. “I’ve made a study of it. Thousands of them. All those housekeepers. All those altar boys. Single mothers in need of counselling.”

  “Stop it.”

  Isabel struggled to explain. How he was like nobody she’d ever met. How she really thought it could work. She was ready to leave town, move to some place where no one knew them. “The boys loved him,” she said.

  “He came to your house?” Alice was appalled.
r />   “He coached soccer, remember? All the kids loved him.”

  “And more than a few of their mothers, if I recall.” Alice’s laugh was bitter. “I can’t believe none of them noticed.”

  “Me neither, to tell you the truth. We were lucky.”

  Alice snorted. The pale light streaming in the window behind her revealed streaks of grey in her short hair, the fine network of wrinkles crumpling the skin around her eyes. Her anger fizzled into disappointment. “So he finds you’re pregnant and runs away?” She slumped into her chair. “I admired him for going to Winnipeg, to the inner city. Even more when I heard he’d returned to Guatemala with the refugees. It’s hard to think of him as a coward.”

  Isabel shrugged, her own anger building. “He was gone. Just like that,” she snapped her fingers. “Before I even knew. I thought of an abortion, I was so mad.”

  “Before you knew? You never told him?”

  “How could I? The other priest wasn’t handing out a forwarding address.” She poured the tea.

  “So why did he leave?”

  Isabel left out the part about her shoes in the bedroom. Just said the old priest found out. She never heard anything from Álvaro after that day.

  “Are you sure he knows about Janna?”

  “The pregnancy was no secret. I told Father Walter whose baby it was.” Isabel sipped her tea. Some kind of mint.

  Alice’s face flushed a deep pink. “So he knew that whole time I took Janna to church? How could you let me do that?”

  “Going to church was all Janna’s idea and so was stopping. She came down one Sunday morning in her sweatpants and T-shirt and said she was going fishing with Trevor. It took me a while to get it out of her — I guess the good father had been praising the sanctity of the virgin birth to these little ten-year-old girls.” Isabel shook her head. “Janna’d said something about her being like Jesus because she didn’t have a father either and he set her straight in no uncertain terms.”

  “I was afraid to ask.” Alice took a paper napkin from a big stack on the table and folded it in half. She pushed some toward Isabel.

  “It’s him that was the big chicken,” Isabel said. “There was this little girl, the church’s daughter, you could say. He should be rejoicing. One of the flock returned. Even if she was a bastard, she was one of their little bastards. When she just stopped coming, did he have the balls to find out what happened? Didn’t he care about her immortal soul? Or was he more worried about being embarrassed?” Isabel’s voice shook as she concentrated on the napkins. “How could I tell Janna one of those assholes was her father?”

  Alice protested. “It would have hurt him very much. He would have felt at fault himself for the younger priest’s…” Alice paused, looking for the right word, “…lapse. He was fond of Álvaro, I remember.”

  “A jealous old queer, probably.”

  “Isabel!” Alice was angry again. “Not everything is about sex.”

  Isabel started on another pile of napkins. “Not everything, maybe. But damn near.”

  Alice looked out the window at the slate grey fields and the brown pasture. Four horses, their heads down, were looking for the green frozen at the roots. “No one forces them to take those vows.”

  Isabel was sorry. She knew Alice’s marriage wasn’t happy and that she had long ago given up hoping for children of her own. That the church meant everything to her, which was probably why she was folding napkins and baking pies for the big dance at the community hall where she and other Catholic women would bring in the new year serving food to drunks.

  “I hope whatever it is you’re doing to stay away from drinking sticks because you’re going to need your wits about you if you really want to sort this out with Janna. What is it, three years now?”

  Isabel nodded. She raised her cup to her mouth, but it was empty. She set it down again, the cup rattling in the saucer.

  “Why didn’t you tell her?” Alice grinned. “It’s not like it would have caused much more fuss than Trevor’s arrival did.”

  Isabel groaned. “I couldn’t have kept that secret if I tried — there was no telling Jason’s dad that this little Indian baby I’d just popped out was his.”

  When word had reached Trevor’s father, he snuck into the hospital when she was alone, asking a nurse to keep a lookout for visitors. He’d had a good look at the baby, sticking his face up close and whispering some Gitxsan words into the open mouth and kissed him. Said he wanted his name on the birth certificate. She’d written “unknown” on Janna’s.

  “I tried to tell her a few times, but I chickened out. I kept thinking that maybe one day he’d show up and tell her himself. When that didn’t happen I made up my mind to confront Father Walter. Enough, I thought. At least I can talk to Álvaro. Send him a picture, maybe. But I showed up at the rectory and they told me Father Walter wasn’t there. When will he be back, I asked. He won’t, they said. A woman, you know who I mean, always hanging around the place. She was very pleased to see my shock when she told me he was gone for good. Retired. I was angry enough to kill someone. That’s when I really went for a loop. Almost lost the kids. ”

  The tears rising in Isabel’s eyes infuriated her. Álvaro’s disappearance had defeated her in some significant way. And after Walter was gone, she stopped pretending to herself that she’d pull herself together and make big changes. She was left with only the small ones, the weeks and months she struggled to stay sober, then the failures, the blackouts, the coming home to find messages from the kids saying which father they were with. The kids always uncomfortable when she made promises. New Year’s the only one she’d never blown.

  Alice took the folded napkins and tucked them into a plastic bin. She set out another stack. “Why now?”

  Isabel’s voice shrank. “She doesn’t know that I really have stopped drinking this time and there’s no reason for her to believe it if she did know. But maybe if I get up the courage to tell her about her father, she’ll at least talk to me.”

  “You still don’t hear from her?”

  “Do you?”

  Alice shook her head. “Cards, that’s all.”

  “Having her mad at me would be better than this nothing.”

  “I’d better find out where he is,” Alice said.

  Jumping up from the table to hug her aunt, Isabel swallowed the lump in her throat. Alice squeezed her tight before pushing her away.

  “If he’s still alive.”

  “Still alive?”

  “People die, Isabel. People die all the time.”

  Isabel wondered if Alice was sick. Who would she tell if she was? Not that husband of hers. If she collapsed on the kitchen floor, he’d just wander through asking if she’d ironed his blue shirt.

  “Last I heard he was in some kind of trouble in Guatemala. We were asked to pray for him.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Guatemala is a very bad place to be a priest. People who try to help the Indians there, they get grabbed, tortured, even killed.” Alice pushed back her chair, all business. “I’ll see what I can find out. Now you better get out of here. I have things to do.”

  When she sat to pull on her boots, Isabel picked up the phone lying on the bench at Alice’s back door. As she had done every day since Christmas, she dialled Janna’s number. Maybe if she thought Alice was calling, she’d answer. The same message. The cellular phone customer is either out of range or not answering the phone — please try your call again later.

  Isabel drove Alejandro’s car too fast along the road twisting between Alice’s fields of frozen sod. As she gained on the only other car on the road, its exhaust a faint whisper of white against the faded asphalt, she was angry again. What she had done with Álvaro back there under the green willows beside the river had been the most serious she’d ever been. And in spite of the way he had disappeared, in spite of the other priest’s disapproval, she refused to feel shame. Especially not after she told Father Walter Prytuluk she was pregnant. The scree
n between them so she didn’t have to see his face as she braced herself to ask where she could reach Álvaro. Is it money you want, he’d said, the disgust bending the word. How do you even know it’s his? Her promiscuous behaviour was common knowledge, he’d said.

  The brake lights flashed on and off ahead of her and the little car fishtailed past the stop sign and out onto the highway. It slid across both lanes of traffic, between an approaching logging truck in one lane and a minivan in the other, coming to a miraculous stop at the edge of the river bank. Isabel tapped the brakes until she inched to a stop. She looked across to where the other driver bent his head into his hands. A small figure stood up behind his seat, a comforting hand on his shoulder. Beyond them the bank dropped down to the half-frozen river, steaming between the chunks of ice. Isabel waited for her heart to slow.

  The only shame she felt, she’d spat out to Father Walter, was for the church. For its cowardice. When she spoke about abortion, his silence told her all she needed to know. She still wondered sometimes if she’d gone ahead with the pregnancy just to spite the old man.

  Across the highway, the driver settled back into his seat, flashed his signal, and pulled out. A plane appeared out of the clouds to the southeast and banked low over the river on its way to the airport. Isabel turned onto the highway and followed it toward town. Toward her little house and the little party she had planned.

  When Isabel opened her back gate, the preparations were well under way. Brush was piled high in the centre of the vegetable plot. On the picnic table, a red and green cloth fluttered in the frigid air, anchored by dishes, cutlery, and a big vat steaming on a Coleman stove. Two stacks of white plastic chairs waited for their occupants to choose a spot to sit upwind of the fire to be lit as soon as it was dark. The barbecue had been wheeled down beside the table; the escaping smoke smelled of wood chips and slow-cooking pork — Frank’s specialty. He, Jasmine, Alejandro, and three or four other friends were sitting on the back deck trying on skates from a tangled pile.

  The back door opened and Jason stepped outside, a Tim Hortons coffee cup in his hand. A tall, skinny man wearing khaki pants and a pale pink shirt, the tan tie pulled loose from his neck, he’d come straight from his dad’s car lot and wasn’t dressed for the outdoors. He struggled to smile. He’d never been comfortable with Isabel’s friends and was, she knew, always worried she was going to embarrass him yet again. She grinned at him, happy that he had made the effort to show up. Glad there was no sign of his wife.