by Gail Bowen
We spent the night in Prince Albert, a small city 150 kilometres north of Saskatoon, famous for the fact that when it had the choice of being home to the province’s university or a federal penitentiary, it chose the pen. In fact, the reason we were stopping in Prince Albert was the jail. Angus had seen a TV program about the prison museum, so late on the afternoon of July 1, Taylor and I were following Angus through dim rooms filled with painfully crafted weapons confiscated from hidden places in the bodies of prisoners. A celebration of Canadian ingenuity.
That night we ate dinner at a Chinese restaurant Ian and I had liked when we had campaigned in the north. Taylor ate a whole order of almond prawns and nodded off at the dinner table. We went to the motel and I switched on Canada Today. The warmth between Keith and me was apparent even on TV; just to see him made me lonely for him. I’d forgotten how painful physical longing could be, and after five minutes I turned the television off and took a shower.
We were all in bed by nine o’clock. The kids slipped into sleep easily. I lay in the dark, listening to the radio. There had been a contest earlier that day; people from all over Canada had been asked to call in with their renditions of our national anthem. A physics class from Halifax played ten pop bottles filled with water; four high-school principals from Saskatoon sang a barbershop harmony; a young girl from Manitoba sang in Ojibway; a Canada goose from Don Mills, Ontario, was disqualified because she was a fraud; a Vancouver group called the Raging Grannies offered a social commentary.
O Canada.
I slept well and woke up to a room filled with sunshine and fresh northern air. On impulse I called Peter. The phone rang and rang, and I was about to hang up when Peter answered, sounding breathless and happy. He had just come in – it was a beautiful morning in the southwest, hot already, and still, and he and Susan, the young woman who trained horses, had just come in from riding through the hills.
“It sounds idyllic,” I said.
“It is idyllic, Mum,” he said quietly. “Everything is starting to look very good again.”
“And Susan is …”
“Susan is the best part,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “I love you, Peter.”
“Same here, Mum.”
I was hanging up when I heard his voice. “Mum, I haven’t forgotten Christy.”
“Neither have I,” I said. Then I did hang up.
The Northern Lights Motel was just off the Hansen Lake Road. It was the kind of place I would have picked to stay in myself: a low-slung log building that housed a restaurant and a store. In the pines out back, I could see a dozen or so log cabins. On each side of the door to the restaurant, truck tires, painted white, bloomed with pink petunias. The effect was clean and cheerful. Other people must have liked the place, too; a no-vacancy sign hung on the hitching post near the entrance.
There were two people in the restaurant. A man, dressed in the newest and best from the Tilley catalogue, sat at a back booth, looking at the menu through round-lensed tortoiseshell glasses. A slender young native woman, wearing blue jeans and a dazzlingly white sleeveless cotton blouse, stood beside him, taking his order. She was a striking figure; her profile was delicate, and her hair, held back from her face by beadwork barrettes, fell shining and straight to her waist.
The kids and I sat down at the counter. There wasn’t much of a demarcation between the restaurant and the store. I knew that if I ordered lake trout, the fish would have been swimming in Havre Lake twenty-four hours earlier, but if I ordered beans, the cook would walk three steps to the store and take the beans off the shelf. The wall behind the counter was filled with Polaroids of weekend fishermen squinting into the sun, holding up their prize catches: northern pike, walleye, lake trout, whitefish.
Angus grabbed my arm and pointed to a sign over the cash register: “Shower Free with Meal. Otherwise $3.50. $5.00 deposit on towels.”
“That wouldn’t exactly bankrupt you, would it?” I whispered.
He grinned, slid off the stool and went over to look at a display of hooks and lures. Taylor followed him.
The woman who had been taking the order came over to our table. She touched my wrist with her index finger.
“Her bracelet,” she said softly. “I’m so glad you came, Mrs. Kilbourn. Just let me put in that man’s order and we can talk.” She turned to Angus. “If you walk down that road out there toward the lake, you’ll see my son fishing on the dock. He says the jack are really biting today.”
Angus shot me a pleading look.
“Half an hour,” I said. “We have to get you settled in camp and get ourselves to Blue Heron Point.”
He was out the door in a flash. When Beth Mirasty came back, she had a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and four glasses.
“Let’s go out back where we can be quiet,” she said. She smiled at Taylor. “Would you like to learn how to make wishbone dolls?” she asked softly. “My kokom’s sewing today. She could teach you.”
Taylor looked at her curiously. “Is Kokom your little girl?” she asked.
“Kokom is Mrs. Mirasty’s grandmother,” I said. “That’s how you say grandmother in Cree.”
The back room appeared to be the family living room. It was simply furnished, and everything in it shone. The linoleum was hard-polished and the pine furniture gleamed. I thought I would like to stay in a motel owned by Beth Mirasty. An old woman sat in a rocking chair by the window. There was a lace curtain behind her, as dazzlingly white as Beth Mirasty’s blouse; the old woman was wearing a pink dress, and her white hair was carefully fixed with beadwork combs, pink and green and white. In front of her was a birch basket filled with scraps of fabric. She was sewing one of them onto a quilt on her knee.
When she heard us, the old lady looked up. She didn’t smile, but there was something about her that was welcoming.
“The little one would like to know how to make wishbone dolls, Kokom,” Beth said.
The old woman leaned forward and said something to Taylor. Then she pointed toward a doorway that seemed to lead into the rest of the flat. Taylor ran off where she had pointed.
“First, you need chicken bones,” the old lady said to me.
After Beth introduced us and poured the lemonade, the old lady sat with her hands folded until Taylor came back with a coffee can. The old lady reached into the coffee can, took out a wishbone and handed it to Taylor. “Think about the face you want to put on the little part that sticks out at the top,” she said.
In the corner was the TV. A large coloured photo of Christy and me was in a frame on top of it. I went to look closer. It was a shot of us in front of the Christmas tree. Christy was wearing a Santa Claus sweatshirt and red overalls. She was holding an old plastic angel.
I remembered the moment. We were decorating the tree, and after the picture was taken, Christy had asked me to tell her the story of how we got the angel.
I had laughed and said, “Oh, it’s just one of those boring family stories.”
“Tell me,” she said, “please.”
And so I had told her how, when Mieka was in kindergarten, she had told her teacher that we were a Catholic family who had lost our angel, and the woman had given it to her for Christmas. And I had told her about how Angus had eaten the pasta off the jar-ring-framed picture of the dogs he had made in grade one, and about the time when Sadie was a pup and Peter had hung dog biscuits on the branches of the tree and we had come down Christmas morning to discover that Sadie had knocked down the tree and eaten the dog biscuits and half the ornaments. Ordinary family stories, but Christy’s yearning as I told them had been almost palpable.
Behind me, Beth Mirasty said, “She brought me that picture herself when she came home before New Year’s. She was so proud of it.”
The week between Christmas and New Year’s. We had all planned to go skiing that week. Then, out of nowhere, Christy had announced she was going to Minneapolis with friends. When she came back, she had talked endlessly about the operas they had seen and
the restaurants where they had eaten. More lies.
“She said last Christmas was the best one she’d ever had,” Beth Mirasty said softly. She picked up the picture and we walked over and sat on a couch in the corner. “Theresa told me you had made her part of your family.”
“What about her own family?” I asked.
Beth Mirasty seemed confused. “I thought she’d told you all that.”
“No,” I said, “she didn’t.”
Beth looked at the photo. For a long time she didn’t say anything, and I had the sense that she was deciding whether to go on. Finally, she shook her head.
“I guess it doesn’t matter any more,” she said. “They’re all passed away except Jackie. He’s Theresa’s brother, and he wouldn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything since Theresa passed on. She was all he had. The parents drank, and they fought, and they beat their kids. It was a terrible thing.”
In the silence I could hear Taylor’s young voice. “Kokom, can I make a dress for my doll out of this silvery cloth or is it too good?”
Kokom said something too soft and low for me to hear, but they both laughed.
I turned back to Beth Mirasty. “Did they live around here? Theresa’s family?”
“In town. In a kind of shack on the outskirts. They burned it down one night when they were drinking.”
“What did they do?” I said.
She shrugged. “They found another shack.”
For a while we were silent again. Then Beth Mirasty said, “When I wrote to you, I said I needed to know if Theresa was happy at the last. Before her accident.”
“Her accident.” I had used the phrase “tragically and accidentally” to describe Christy’s death in her obituary; the newspaper had never reported that Christy committed suicide. Beth Mirasty didn’t know the truth. Her brown eyes were intent; I could feel the tension in her body.
I remembered that last day. Christy running across the lawn, hugging me, smelling of soap and sunshine and cotton. “I’ve missed this family,” she had said. And later, she had stood in front of a field white with tundra swans, splitting the air with their plaintive cries as they migrated north. “If they’re smart and they’re lucky, they’ll make it,” she had said. It was best to end the movie there.
I took the photo from Beth Mirasty’s hands. “Yes,” I said, “Theresa was happy at the end.”
Somewhere a clock struck. I looked at my watch. “I guess it’s time for me to leave. I have to get my boy up to camp.”
“I’ll walk down to the dock with you,” Beth said.
When we came through the clearing in the bush to the lake, I could feel my breath catch in my throat. Havre Lake was one of those northern lakes that is so vast it makes your mind stop. There is something anarchic about such lakes. They make their own weather and have their own intricate geography of islands and points and narrows through which they reach out into other unimaginably vast bodies of water. They exist on maps as huge, whimsically shaped expanses of nothing in the middle of the neat cartography of the places we know.
Angus and Beth’s son were fishing off the dock.
When he heard me, Angus turned and held up the fingers of one hand.
“Five minutes, Mum, please, just five. There’s a jack in there that’s so ready to be caught,” he whispered.
“Five, and that’s it,” I said.
Beth and I walked down to the beach and stood side by side, looking out at the horizon.
“I always feel scared when I look at these lakes,” I said.
“Can’t you swim?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “but that’s not good enough here, is it?”
“No,” she agreed, “it’s not.” She pointed toward the west. “That’s where you’re going, Blue Heron Point. When we were growing up, the only store was over there. Then they built the hotel. Now it’s a little town. Not a very nice one.
“Anyway, when we were young, that was the treat, getting in the boat once a month before freeze-up and going across the lake to the store. Theresa used to take money out of her father’s pocket when he passed out, and she’d take the boat over there herself to get food for her and her brother. Sometimes when it got worse than usual at home, she’d stop on one of the islands and she and Jackie would stay there until the groceries ran out. Just sleeping on the ground. Kokom would make my dad take blankets out for them to lie on, and they’d be safe for a while. But they always had to come to shore.
“I’ll never forget watching that little girl start out across the big lake with Jackie sitting beside her. Two little dots in the boat, so small, until the boat was just a dot, and then it disappeared.”
I was relieved when I heard Angus shouting that he’d caught a fish. Beth Mirasty’s memories of Theresa’s childhood were taking me to a place I didn’t want to be.
Angus landed his jackfish, and it was a beauty. Beth offered to clean it and freeze it so we could pick it up on the way home. As we walked toward the Northern Lights Motel, Angus was ecstatic. The boys ran on ahead with the fish. I turned to Beth.
“Does Theresa’s brother still live around here?”
“He lives in Blue Heron Point.”
“Do you have an address?”
“Whatever pub opens first for the day.” She shook her head with annoyance. “It’s such a waste. He comes over here to eat sometimes if he hasn’t hocked his boat to buy a bottle. When he’s sober, he’s as good a guide as there is. Theresa taught him. But when he’s drinking, he’s just another drunk. If you want to talk to him, be sure to get there in the first hour after the bar opens. Before that he’s too sick with wanting it, and then after that he’s just sick.”
Beth stopped at the back of the motel with the boys. She sent her son inside for a knife. She said to Angus, “You might as well learn to do this now. Your mother can go and get your sister.”
Taylor had a lap full of dolls. With their painted faces, their bright scraps of skirts and their wishbone legs, they were odd and very lovely.
“Dynamite dolls, T.,” I said, and meant it.
Kokom said to Taylor, “In my room is a red box that had candy in it. A heart box. You can have it for your dollies.”
Taylor ran off. When she was safely out of the room, I heard the old lady’s voice.
“That Desjarlais girl. Let her rest in peace now. She’s been wandering all her life.”
I felt a chill. I turned. The old lady was sewing on her quilt again. I hadn’t noticed before how badly her fingers had been gnarled by arthritis, but her needle never stopped. She didn’t look up.
“The parents were no good,” she said. “When she was young like your little one here, the parents used to leave her with the babies. There were two babies then. The family had a big dog, female. The kids used to play with it. One day in the spring that female dog was in season. There were wild dogs or maybe wolves. They must have smelled the female dog on that little kid. They came and tore that baby to bits. It was a terrible thing. The parents blamed Theresa. They beat her something terrible. She brought her brother and stayed with us for a while. We wanted to keep her, but they said no.”
“How did she ever get away?” I said. I was really thinking aloud, but the old lady answered me. Her voice was strong and filled with anger.
“She didn’t. The wild dogs got her, too. Let her rest. It doesn’t matter any more.”
It didn’t take long to get Angus settled in at camp. As soon as he jumped out of the car, he saw two boys he had known from the summer before. They came over and grabbed his gear, and the three of them disappeared.
“Goodbye,” I shouted after him.
He ran back and gave Taylor a quick hug.
“Please don’t kiss me, Mum,” he said under his breath.
I gave him a manly pat on the back. “See you in two weeks,” I said. I took Taylor’s hand. “Looks like it’s just you and me against the world, kiddo. What do you want for supper?”
“Cheeseburgers,” she said.
“The north is famous for its cheeseburgers,” I said.
The drive into Blue Heron Point was not a pretty one. There’d been forest fires in the area the year before, and the charred trunks of trees rose spectral against the summer sky. On the rocky faces of the hills kids had spray-painted messages: “OKA NOW,” “CARLA RULES,” “CLASS OF 91 NO FUTUR.” Blue Heron Point was the kind of northern town that exists for the people who come to fish. All the buildings faced out on the dirt road that followed the shoreline. There were two inns, a couple of motels, and, set back from the road, the Kingfisher Hotel. They all had bars, and they all had no-vacancy signs. There were two general stores with restaurants, and a liquor store.
“Which place looks best to eat, T.?” I said.
“The one with the dogs fighting outside,” she said.
In fact, the food was good and plentiful: a homemade cheeseburger and a dinner plate filled with greasy, salty French fries.
After we finished, I said, “Now for the hard part, finding a place to stay. I wish I’d asked Greg’s uncle if we could use his cottage.”
“But you didn’t,” Taylor said, twirling a fry in her ketchup.
“Nope, it didn’t work out,” I said. “Let me go and ask at the counter what they suggest. I’m too tired to drive any more today. Besides, there’s someone I want to try to find here.”
I looked at my watch. Six o’clock. According to Beth’s calculations, Jackie Desjarlais would have been drinking for six hours. Tomorrow would be better.
The woman at the cash register was not encouraging. It was the Tuesday after the long weekend, and a lot of people take their holidays the first two weeks in July. I paid for our lunch, thanked her and started to leave. She called me back.
