Wildwood

by Elinor Florence

  As I lay on the rock-hard ground, clutching my ankle and moaning, another of those strange, unbidden childhood memories suddenly flooded over me.

  My parents and I were hiking the Grand Canyon, marvelling at the cinnamon-coloured cliffs and the deep, purple-shadowed valley. We descended the Bright Angel Trail, which winds from the rim down to the valley floor in a series of steep switchbacks. After an hour, my father told us we had come far enough. He pointed to a sign:

  AVOID DEADLY MISTAKES! DESCEND AT YOUR OWN RISK!

  We turned around to hike back up to the rim just as a middle-aged woman charged past us, tugging a little boy by the hand. She was wearing a sundress and spike-heeled sandals that sank into the sandy trail, carrying nothing but a tiny jewelled purse. She glanced at the sign and then the pair disappeared around the next curve.

  My father frowned and shook his head. “That silly woman doesn’t even have a water bottle! And if she passes out, what’s that poor little kid supposed to do?”

  Lying on the ground, clutching my ankle, and staring into the infinite blueness, I could see his face and hear his voice as clearly as if he were standing beside me. It felt as if my wise and loving father, who had ironically died because of another driver’s carelessness, had returned from the grave to warn me — just as he had all those years ago.

  Ever since Bridget had gotten lost in the bush, I had been deathly afraid that something would happen to her. But now I had an even more terrifying thought: what if something happened to me instead? Bridget would need to stay warm until help arrived. And that meant keeping the fire alive.

  I dragged myself into the house, my ankle forgotten in the face of this new dread. “Bridget, I have a little job for you. I want to show you how to start the fire.”

  “Me?” Her blue eyes grew enormous.

  “You know that you must never, never play with fire. We’ve talked about that before. But making a fire in the stove is different. If I hurt myself or get sick, then you need to keep the fire going.”

  She concentrated fiercely as I showed her how to crumple up newspaper and add a handful of dry twigs for kindling. I demonstrated the correct position of the lever that opened the draught. But no matter how she tried, she couldn’t strike the safety match on the rough surface of the matchbox. Her chin started to quiver.

  “Never mind the matches, darling. I have a lighter. Try this instead.”

  That was easier. She struck the starter with her small thumb, and the flame leaped up. I showed her how to lower the flame to the paper at an angle without burning her fingers, and she watched intently as the paper and then the kindling began to crackle. She added a larger stick of firewood, and closed the lid, beaming with pride.

  “Don’t worry about me, Mama! I’m a real firefly!”

  After she returned to her play, I wrapped an elastic bandage from the first aid kit around my ankle and sat down in the rocking chair with a cup of my own delicious coffee, turning my thoughts back to that happy day hiking in the Grand Canyon. I hadn’t thought of it since The Accident. When I concentrated hard, the memory began to take shape.

  I remembered that the steep hike back to the top was very tiring. When I complained, my father pretended he was a wolf and chased me up the trail while I screamed with laughter. My mother followed us, laughing too, and her teeth were white against her tanned face. We always had so much fun, the three of us. My father called us the Three Musketeers.

  Then suddenly there was only One Musketeer.

  I leaned back in the chair and gently rocked back and forth. Why was I remembering my parents now, after all these years? Why should they come to me here, in this wild remote place, so far from the desert where they lived and loved and blossomed like cactus flowers?

  Maybe they came to join the other ghosts in this house, the friendly spirits who inhabited Wildwood. Or maybe it was because I needed them now as I never had before.

  It was snowing — not the few flakes that had drifted down earlier in the month, but a heavy fall like lace curtains. We sat in front of the bay window all morning, watching as if hypnotized. The snow silently transformed the bleak landscape, covering each blade of grass, weighing down the naked branches, topping the stumps with white cones.

  We tried to pick out one snowflake with our eyes and follow it to the ground, but this was impossible when there were so many millions. “No two flakes are alike,” I told Bridget, then wondered if this were true. How could anyone know for sure?

  We ate our lunch in front of the window, too fascinated to tear ourselves away. Finally, Bridget wanted more. “Mama, let’s go outside and feel it!”

  We dressed in our warmest clothes. I was grateful for our winter boots now. The thermometer outside the kitchen window showed minus ten Celsius, the coldest temperature we had ever experienced. Yet the snow pouring silently from the white sky above seemed so benign. It blurred the edges of the barn and the cabin, and turned the trees into ghostly shapes.

  When we stepped outside, we both felt a primitive impulse to mark this virgin territory, probably the same urge that drove the pioneers. We ran through the soft snow, picked it up, and threw it into the air. I tried to make a snowball, but it fell apart in my mittened hands. This surprised me. In movies, people always made snowballs. There was an unexpected swishing noise when we walked. Amazingly, this soft, silent substance had the quality of producing sound.

  We fell onto our backs and made snow angels, admiring them before their perfection was destroyed by a prancing Riley. We opened our mouths and felt the individual dots of cold land on our tongues. The scarves tied across our faces were studded with frozen pearls. This was another thing I hadn’t known before, that moist air would freeze against fabric.

  When we finally came back into our welcoming kitchen, the kettle was singing its little song on the back of the stove. I poured boiling water over cocoa powder mixed with evaporated milk and sugar, while Bridget dragged several old blankets into the back kitchen and made a bed for Riley.

  I had never imagined myself sharing my dwelling with a dog, but I worried that the nights were too cold for him in the doghouse. I felt like a mother bear going into hibernation with my three cubs — one human, one canine, and one feline.

  “Mama!” Bridget’s voice was excited as she relayed a new discovery. “Riley’s eyes are exactly the same colour as ours. I’m pretty sure he must be related to us.”

  The next morning we looked out at a world that was supernaturally bright. The sun was shining, but the sky was as cold and hard as blue diamonds, and the snow had transformed the panorama outside into a dazzling fairyland.

  After stoking the fire, I checked the thermometer. It was minus twenty degrees Celsius, or four degrees below zero Fahrenheit. We had now dropped below the zero mark even on the Fahrenheit scale, which made it seem even colder.

  The kitchen windows were covered with fantastic frost patterns, shaped like feathers and ferns and galaxies of stars. “Jack Frost has been here!” I said. Bridget was fascinated by the idea of a sprite painting pictures in the night. She pressed her little fingers against the glass to melt the frost and make her own designs.

  It was Monday again, laundry day. I thought longingly of the laundromat in town, but I couldn’t justify the expense. Besides, our monthly trips to town had to be fast and efficient now that the days were so short.

  Warm and dirty, or cold and clean? Ironically, I recalled the term Siberian dilemma. If you fall through the ice into freezing water, you have four minutes to live. If you jump out of the water, you have three minutes to live. Obviously there is no good choice.

  Remembering my great-aunt, I squared my shoulders. She must have done her laundry in winter. I pumped the well water — even more frigid than usual — into the waiting pots and pans, then hauled out the tubs and the wringer.

  When the water was hot enough, I filled the tubs and allowed Bridget to slosh the dirty clothes around, rubbing them on the washboard while she sang to herself. After they were ri
nsed, I hung the smaller things on a wooden drying rack in front of the stove, but the rest had to go outside on the clothesline. When the first load was ready, I dressed warmly and carried it outside in a wicker basket. I had to shake the snow off the line before I could hang the wet clothing. When I turned back to the house, I saw that our massive home looked as if it had sunk into the ground. Snow had drifted against the exterior walls and buried the foundation.

  I came back into the warm, damp kitchen. The wet clothes on the drying rack released their moisture into the air. After a couple of hours, during which I tidied the laundry things and washed the kitchen floor, I donned my coat and boots and gloves and scarf and hat — marvelling at the amount of time spent getting dressed and undressed in this climate — and trudged back to the clothesline.

  The clothes were frozen stiff and hard. I scolded myself for not realizing that the moisture inside the wet clothes would freeze. What should I do with them now?

  It wasn’t likely they would get any drier if I left them outside overnight, so I stacked them in my arms like firewood and brought them into the kitchen, where I leaned them against the table and chairs. I was hanging my coat in the back kitchen when Bridget yelled delightedly. “Mama, look!”

  My long underwear, which was leaning against the table, had started to thaw. It was now bending forward from the middle exactly as if it were taking a bow. One cotton shirt, with its arms frozen straight out like a scarecrow, gracefully lowered first one arm and then the other. A pair of my jeans sank to its knees in prayer.

  This struck us both as hilarious. I started to laugh uncontrollably. My stomach clenched and my eyes closed and my voice became soundless. I laughed because it looked so funny, and laughed because Bridget was laughing, and then laughed some more because it felt so good.

  Although we had finished Reddy Fox and Peter Cottontail and were now in the middle of Prickly Porky, Bridget still called them the Paddy books.

  “Old Man Coyote crept up on Paddy with the hungriest look in his yellow eyes and black anger in his heart.” We were sitting in the rocking chair and I was reading to Bridget, whose little body was tense with excitement as the coyote stalked Paddy with the intention of eating him.

  Bridget jumped when Wynona’s characteristic triple knock sounded on the door, but she remained on my lap. “Come on in!” I called. We heard the outer door open, then the sound of stamp-ing feet.

  Wynona was now eating supper with us three or four times a week. The school bus let her off at the end of our driveway in the gathering dusk, and she walked home in the pitch darkness after our meal was finished. I was worried about her safety, alone in the dark and the cold, but she insisted that she was all right.

  Because she was walking for miles every week, Wynona was becoming quite slender beneath her baggy clothes. Her hearty appetite was putting a serious dent in our food budget, but I took comfort in feeding her properly. Her lovely caramel skin glowed with health, probably as a result of not subsisting on Red Bull and potato chips.

  What I enjoyed the most was seeing Bridget sit at the table with us. She still didn’t speak to Wynona, or even speak to me while Wynona was present, but she listened to our conversation and followed us with her eyes.

  Now I continued reading aloud while Wynona threw her parka over the back of a chair and sat down to listen. She seemed just as engaged with the story as Bridget.

  “At the last minute, Paddy was warned by the screeching cries of his friend Sammy Jay, and dived into the water, just as Old Man Coyote pounced!”

  A faint scorching smell filled the air, and I jumped up from the rocking chair, almost throwing Bridget to the floor. “My casserole!” I wrapped my hands in a dishtowel and snatched the pan out of the oven. “Why don’t you keep reading, Wynona?”

  Wynona picked up the book and turned the page. “Paddy … went … to … the …” A pause. “I can’t read too good,” she said reluctantly.

  I hoped my face didn’t reveal my dismay. However had she reached the sixth grade?

  “Would you like any help, Wynona?” I asked cautiously.

  “I guess. I have an essay that’s due tomorrow but I don’t know what to write about.”

  “Show me your assignment and we’ll think of a few ideas. Bridget, you can set the table while I help Wynona. We’ll finish the Paddy book later.”

  Wynona rummaged in her battered backpack and handed me her assignment. I read it aloud: “Write an essay of two hundred words on the following topic: My Best Friend.”

  “I don’t have a best friend. I don’t have any friends.” Wynona literally hung her dark head as she gazed at the checkerboard linoleum.

  “Well, you have us! Why don’t you write an essay about Bridget?”

  Wynona stared at the wall for the longest time before she began to write, laboriously. After ten minutes she threw down her pen. “I wrote eighty-three words. I can’t think of anything else.” She handed the paper to me. Bridget listened intently while I read aloud.

  My Best Friend

  She is four years old. Her name is Briget. She live on my road. She has black hare. Her mama is Mole. They have a dog. All three of them have blue ise. Briget dos not talk to people. They do not have tv. They do not have internet. They do not have X box. They do not have a hare dryer. They do not have a mikrowave. I like going there. It is like the olden daze. They have a cat to.

  I kept my voice bright. “Wynona, that’s very good! You found lots of things to say! Why don’t you read it aloud, and then we’ll help you think of some more words to add, so it will be long enough.”

  After a few minutes of brainstorming, she added another dozen sentences and I helped her correct the spelling, and encouraged her to copy the whole thing out again. I calculated that we had brought it up to a third-grade level. I had serious doubts about the Canadian education system if this was any indication. Then I remembered that Arizona’s public schools weren’t winning any international awards either.

  We sat down to shepherd’s pie made with ground beef, mashed potatoes, and peas. “Bridget, don’t play with your food. Look at Wynona, she had two helpings.”

  Bridget obediently finished eating, her eyes on Wynona’s plate. One advantage of having another person around was that my daughter couldn’t complain or talk back.

  For dessert, I allowed them each to have two freshly baked oatmeal cookies, which I had mastered that very afternoon using my trusty Five Roses Cook Book. I smiled when I read the preface to the cookie section: Cookies are the children’s everlasting delight, in which case it is well to remember that men are but children of a larger growth.

  Bridget cleared the table while I washed the dishes and Wynona dried them. “I better go.” She pulled on her heavy parka and prepared to make the freezing three-mile trek to her house. At least she had a flashlight. I insisted upon that.

  She was wrapping her woollen scarf around her neck when Bridget rose from her chair and followed her to the door. Wynona looked at me with her usual impassive expression then down at Bridget.

  Bridget raised her face and gazed up at Wynona. She opened her little mouth. There was an expectant hush. All three of us stood stock still, waiting. Even the house seemed to be holding its breath.

  My fists clenched while I silently pleaded with her: Please. Just. One. Word.

  Bridget closed her mouth again and lowered her face. Suddenly she flung her arms around Wynona’s waist and hugged her tight, burrowing her head into Wynona’s stomach. I released the air in my lungs. She had been so close!

  Wynona put her arms around Bridget and hugged her back, grinning. Deep dimples broke out in her cheeks, and her black eyes shone. Why, she’s going to be a lovely girl someday, I thought. And Bridget, bless her little heart, was the one who finally made her smile.

  November 30, 1924

  The enemy has arrived at our gates, and for the next six months we must do battle. I hope I am not speaking too optimistically when I say “six months.” The Canadians refer to the
calendar year as “nine months winter and three months bad sleighing,” but I trust that is a witticism. Besides, I have resolved never to complain. The snow may arise deep and heavy around our doors, but it is a life-giving force, nurturing the earth, providing an endless supply of water, unsurpassed in quality and without cost.

  Each day we are reminded that the animal kingdom surrounds us. What was pristine at nightfall is marked in the morning with tracks like scattered ribbons, crossing and weaving. Deer tracks are heart-shaped and evenly spaced. Fox steps are short and neat. The coyote drags his feet when he lifts them from the snow. Lynx prints look like those of a large cat. Moose leave a long, sliding track, cleft in front and pointed behind. Weasel tracks look as if a man had pressed both thumbs into the snow side by side.

  I, too, have been learning to walk on the snow, with the aid of “snowshoes.” These resemble tennis racquets strapped to the feet with leather thongs. They distribute one’s weight evenly across the surface, once one has the knack. It’s all in the way you hold your mouth, as my granny says!

  The snow has another advantage — it allows us to use the sleigh. What a blessing to sail lightly over the frozen trail rather than rattling up and down in the wagon. One day I was in such a pleasurable trance that I forgot to hang on. The sleigh hit a buried stump and I flew off headfirst! Fortunately the snow was soft, but I nearly disappeared. As I floundered to my feet, rivulets of icy water poured down my neck. After laughing heartily, George tucked me into the buffalo robe and said: “No more high dives for you, Molly!” (Molly is his pet name for me.)

  It has become quite an ordeal to use the outhouse. This homely structure is beautifully situated with an outlook toward the creek, but when everything inside is covered with frost, one doesn’t spend time admiring the view!