Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

  “Don’t look so worried, Mag,” he said and pulled me onto his lap. “Nothing’s going to happen to me. I’m Mr. Safety, remember?”

  Dad smelled of tobacco and woodsmoke and the outdoor tang of fall leaves. I began counting the freckles on his arms.

  “Do you think I have as many freckles on my arms as there are stars in the sky?” he asked.

  “Maybe more,” I said. It was what I always said and it was what he always asked. As long as I was counting his freckles, he was my captive.

  Nothing bad had happened. It was only a terror. Still I worried.

  —

  As I walked to the school bus each morning, shuffling my boots along in the fresh snow to make my own trail, Jenny already a powder blue beacon by the power pole at the highway, I worried about leaving Mom at home alone, about the wild way she swung the axe when she was splitting kindling and the way Dad nagged her to be careful. One of these days she was going to chop off her own foot, he said. And when we got off the bus at the end of the day, just before we rounded the final bend by the bent pine tree and our little house came into view, I worried that I’d see it engulfed in flames, or already a smoking heap. And each time it stood blandly, paint peeling to grey, smoke rising from the chimney pipe, I felt my tight muscles loosen and I broke into a run.

  We were a normal family; that’s our story. Our days were full of riverbanks and gravel roads, bicycles and grasshoppers. But you think a thing, you open a door. You invite tragedy in. That’s what my worry taught me.

  [ TWO ]

  THERE WERE FAMILIES IN Duchess Creek who knew trouble like their own skin. Things went wrong for these families as a matter of course, and they were the subject of kitchen table conversations over the pouring of coffee and the dipping of biscuits. The Lutzes were one of those families. They lived a couple of miles from our place in a half-built house with plastic stapled over the windows and tarps on the roof to keep the rain out.

  “It always comes in threes.” Glenna was having tea with my mother at the kitchen table. Her spoon rang against her cup, punctuating the authority of this remark. She let it sink in. Glenna worked at the nursing station in Duchess Creek, so she had the inside story on most of the tragedies in the area. “First the twins, then Peggy’s cancer treatments, and now this.”

  “Poor Mickey,” Mom said.

  Mickey Lutz was my best friend in Duchess Creek. Mom would let me go to their house for sleepovers only if Helmer was away on one of his hunting trips with his buddies. “On a tear,” was what Mom called it. The house smelled like baby piss and sour milk. Dirty dishtowels hardened into place littered the living room, and balled-up socks, chewed baby toys, and drifts of dog hair. The Lutzes had a little white and brown dog named Trixie. Trixie was going grey around the mouth, like an old man, but she was so faithful she would run alongside Mickey and me on our bikes, limping to keep up. When we stopped, she’d curl up in the gravel on the side of the road, exhausted. But as soon as we made a move again, she’d force herself up on her rickety old legs and start running.

  The bed Mickey and I slept in was always coated with white dog hair, and I would try to discreetly brush it off before I got in. Once, before bed, Peggy gave me an orange that smelled like a dirty sock. When I peeled it, the segments were dried out. I ate it anyway, because Mickey was eating hers and didn’t seem to notice. For breakfast we had crackers and orange pop.

  “The Lutzes all came in together,” Glenna continued. “Just showed up at the nursing station like a pack of wolves with their injured. Helmer was hanging off Peggy’s shoulder, poor thing; she could barely hold him up, and him dragging this bloody foot across the floor. Little Mickey had the baby.”

  When Glenna came for coffee, she would bring her own packets of Sweet’N Low. She bought them in big boxes at the co-op in Williams Lake. It allowed her to count calories, so she said. It seemed to be her only gesture towards trying to lose weight. She tore open the Sweet’N Low packets as Mom refilled her cup and then, two at once, poured the powder into her coffee. She stirred, staring into her cup, giving Mom time to ask the questions to which she’d have the answers.

  “Poor Peggy,” said Mom. “How did he do it?”

  “He was hunting.”

  They both laughed at this. I knew it was because Helmer’s idea of hunting was sitting on the tailgate of his truck in the sun, drinking beer and waiting for game to wander by. “You know Helmer,” Glenna said, “if there’s trouble, he’ll find it. He forgot the rifle was loaded? Who knows? Took off the whole big toe and part of the next two.”

  Their heads moved left to right, slowly, in unison. It was pity, sincere, but with just a hint of self-satisfaction. I don’t think it’s fair to call their talk gossip, though. If they could have, they would have set Helmer up with a regular paying job. Driving truck would suit him, Mom said, doing deliveries town to town, up and down Highway 20, something not too challenging that would keep him out of the house and Peggy and the kids in groceries.

  Still, there was always that underlying confidence that things like this couldn’t happen to us. Glenna and Mom had husbands who knew better than to carry around their rifles with the safety off. They themselves knew better than to stay home pregnant with twins, like Peggy had, well past the due date.

  “I don’t know why she didn’t get him to drive her to Williams Lake,” Glenna still said every time she came to visit, though it had happened months ago now and she’d heard all of Helmer’s excuses. I’d heard Mom say Glenna kept talking about it because she felt guilty since one of the babies died on her shift, and Peggy herself had nearly bled to death in the nursing station and had to be rushed to the Williams Lake hospital.

  As for the cancer, the talk was that Peggy had never taken good care of herself. She spent too much time inside, she didn’t get enough fresh air. They didn’t eat properly either. Everyone knew that when Helmer got his welfare cheque, Peggy would stock up on TV dinners. I’d seen her myself in the store, wearing that defiantly ashamed face as she stacked the counter with the flat boxes. Then when the money ran out, the Lutzes lived on Wonderbread and jam.

  “He’s a dead weight around Peggy’s neck,” Glenna said, stirring. “She’d be better off without him. Best thing that could happen to that family, Helmer isn’t paying attention, gets airborne out over the canyon.”

  “He’s got horseshoes up the whazoo, that guy,” Mom said. “He should be dead by now.”

  “He should be dead three times over. Listen to us. I take it back, God,” Glenna called to the kitchen ceiling.

  “Yeah, well,” muttered Mom. “More coffee?” She glanced at me and Jenny playing checkers in the patch of sunlight by the woodstove. I suppose Mom thought that her conversations with Glenna were part of our education.

  —

  Mickey stayed with us the night her mother lost one of the twins. She stayed with us again when her mom found out she had cancer and had to fly to Vancouver for treatments. And she stayed with us the night after her dad shot off half his foot with his 30.30. Mom had bought the new McCall’s magazine and Mickey and I sat cross-legged on the bed cutting out the Betsy dolls. I could hear Mom at the kitchen counter, getting down pans, then the crash as they all slid to the floor.

  “Sorry!” she called, to no one in particular. She began to hum Sweet Caroline: “Good times never seemed so good …” and petered out. Then, in a fresh breath, “I’ve been inclined … dammit.” Something else clattered to the floor. “To believe they never would …”

  She was making meatloaf following a recipe that allowed her to use the roasting pan on top of the woodstove. Mickey’s and my feet were dusted with breadcrumbs from running through the kitchen looking for scissors and tape. Mom called to me to bring her a piece of toilet paper—she had grated her finger along with the carrots.

  “Let’s pretend I’m the dad,” said Mickey when I came back. She said it like “lepretend,” which irritated me. She wasn’t a baby. She should speak properly.

 
“Lepretend I just bought a new truck. Like it?” She drove her paper doll along the edge of my bedspread.

  “What colour is it?” I asked.

  “It’s red,” she said.

  Her games bored me, but I played along because I knew that this was the Lutz family story about how one twin died. Helmer didn’t drive to Williams Lake that night because he didn’t think his truck would make it. He always kept a couple of cans of transmission fluid in the back so he could top it up every few miles, all the while complaining about how he needed a new truck.

  Mom had fumed about it for days when she’d heard.

  “Slouching around with his guilty, hangdog look,” she said. Hangdog was the word Mom used to describe the kind of men who treated their families so badly in the privacy of their own homes that when they went out, they couldn’t look anyone in the eye. Especially other women. Guilty conscience, that was the hangdog look.

  “Lazy son-of-a-bitch,” Mom had said. “Cowardly, lazy son-of-a-bitch. Blames it on his truck.”

  Dad had laughed.

  “What?” Mom demanded.

  “Oh nothing, nothing,” he’d said, smiling.

  “Tell me what’s so funny then. You think losing a baby and almost dying yourself is funny?” She was really mad. “She’d be better off without him. At least then she could keep the welfare cheque for herself and the kids. He’s useless. Like a baby, only he’s bigger and he eats more.”

  —

  “Lepretend you’re the mom and you’re going to have a baby,” said Mickey.

  Mickey always wanted to play these improved-version-of-reality games. Even though they bored me, usually I said, “Okay and my baby is the next king of the empire and we have to protect him from the kidnappers who are hiding in the hills nearby.” And that way we were both happy. But not today. Today I made my Betsy doll say, “I don’t feel so good. I think I’m going to have my baby.”

  “I’ll drive you to the hospital,” Mickey’s doll said.

  “No thanks. I have my own truck,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.

  Mickey stared at me, at a loss for a minute.

  “My truck’s not new,” I said. “But it works fine.”

  “Let’s go outside and play,” said Mickey.

  That night, lying with Mickey’s feet near my head and Jenny whistle-snoring in the next bed, I listened as the coyotes started yipping. One began it, a full-voiced, forsaken wail, long and high. Then others took it up, and the dogs from the nearby Indian reserve joined in, their unburdening ringing in the night.

  At the other end of my bed, Mickey was crying. I could hear her, though she tried to stifle it.

  I felt sorry for Mickey. But more than that, I was glad I was not her.

  [ THREE ]

  NIGHTS WHEN I COULDN’T SLEEP, when I worried about the fire in the woodstove and whether it would get too hot and set the roof on fire and we’d lose everything like the families whose kids had to come to school wearing their neighbours’ too-big and too-small cast-offs, I would tiptoe to our bedroom door and peek out.

  “I’m thirsty,” I’d say. And if Mom or Dad nodded, I padded across the warm floor, past the stove, brushing my hand across the back of Dad’s chair as I went. I couldn’t keep glasses of water on the dresser. Mom had an obsessive knowledge of the habits of mice. She knew, for instance, that though they only needed tiny amounts of water to survive, they did need water, and so each night before bed she made sure that cups and glasses were tipped bottoms up and the water bucket was covered with a board. One time, she had wakened to the sound of something rustling through the wastebasket and found a mouse going after the hardened flour and salt play-dough that Jenny and I had been rolling into cakes in the shower stall, then dropped in there. She slapped a piece of cardboard over the top of the basket and woke the whole house as she carried it out to the front yard, dumped it and smashed at the mouse with a shovel, her nightgown flapping in the moonlight. Dad, in his pyjama bottoms, stood at the door laughing sleepily. “Just let it go,” he called.

  Her obsession worked to my advantage, since it meant I had to stand at the counter and drink down the whole glass of water, dry the glass and return it, bottom up, to the cupboard. That meant I could linger within the safety of Dad lightly snoring in his chair and the snap of Mom’s game of solitaire on the table.

  Sometimes I would find Mom and Dad playing cards together, with the table pulled close to the woodstove and the kerosene lantern burning between them. I’d drink my water and watch them, absorbed in their hands, shifting cards, teasing each other. Those rare nights I was content to go back to bed and listen to their muffled game and the sporadic victory shout from Mom, followed by Dad’s low laughter.

  But usually, if I couldn’t sleep after the drink of water, I followed up with a tiptoed trip to the tin pot in the bathroom, shivering in my nightgown, because the bathroom never warmed up. Sometimes Dad noticed and said, “Can’t sleep?” and he pushed himself out of his chair and came to sit on the edge of my bed with me. He’d tuck the blankets close around my chin. “Imagine we’re out in the bush and we’re building a lean- to shelter,” he’d say. “We’re setting some long sticks and fir boughs against the ridgepole. The clouds are building up for a good, hard storm, but we have to be patient. We want to be able to build a fire in front of the lean-to that’s protected from the wind. One branch after another, weaving them into each other so they hold together. Make a nice, firm mat against the wind. You keep laying down the boughs, Maggie, and I’ll make the fire. Then you gather up some leaves to put inside so it’ll be nice and soft. Here comes the rain. We’re just in time.”

  I was glad to be in my bed then, and I could feel myself drift into the safety of sleep.

  In the late summer and fall Dad would take me into the woods almost every weekend. Jenny never came on these outings and I never wondered why. She was off with her friends, playing Barbies or riding bikes down to the river for picnics and to play house in the forts they built. I figured she wouldn’t have wanted to come. Dad and I never went very far, maybe an hour or so from home at most. Sometimes we went fishing in one of the small lakes. If there was an abandoned canoe or rowboat on shore, and often there was, we took that out, cast into the green softness of the early morning, mist rising up, the plop of a fish going for a fly. Once we built a raft ourselves, spent most of the day at it, cutting poles and lashing them to two floater logs. Then we paddled across the lake to an island where we made a fire and stayed until the moon rose. Sometimes we looked for mushrooms or berries and we brought a feed home to Mom and Jenny. But my favourite thing was when Dad showed me how to build a shelter for real. He knew how to make lean-tos, teepee style shelters, or natural shelters that already provided protection from the elements, like an overhanging rock that formed a cave and just needed some insulating leaves tucked into it for added warmth.

  “I want to show you the place I found, Maggie,” he said one Sunday when I was nine.

  Little lakes dotted the land around Duchess Creek, and roads led to many of them. Some of the roads were logging roads. Some had been made by homesteaders who’d put up cabins in the woods, made a go of it for a while, hand-logging or doing odd jobs, then moved on and left the cabins to the raccoons and the mice, shells of hand-chinked logs and caved-in roofs, mouldy newspapers, dusty shelves and canning jars. I liked to imagine what these cabins would be like at night, with the wind whistling through the empty window spaces and the dust kicking up where the door used to be and moonlight falling on rusted bedsprings.

  It was fall. Dad kept the window open a crack; a sharp tangy breeze freshened the cab. As we followed the rutted road deeper into the woods, we slowed and the sun on the windshield warmed my face. The truck bounced over rocks and tree roots, rocking me to sleepiness.

  “Warm in here, eh?” Dad said. He wore his blue flannel jacket; his red hair curled over the collar. “Hold the wheel for me?”

  I scooted over and held on while he took off his jacket. The
steering wheel jerked like something alive in my hands.

  “You want to drive?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Dad gripped the wheel again then braked to a stop as I crawled under his arm to sit in the little triangle of seat between his legs. He put his hand over mine on the gearshift and helped me find first. We lurched forward then stalled.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Try again, Maggie.”

  Once we were riding along in second I relaxed a little into Dad’s warm chest. His freckled arms, and his scent of sweat and tobacco, made a protective circle around me.

  I drove until the track petered out into grass, then Dad took over again. The woods closed around us, a lit tunnel of yellow, orange and red. Aspen leaves whipped the truck windows and caught in the mirrors; trees scraped along our sides; a branch with brilliant yellow leaves caught in the windshield wipers and fluttered there like a butterfly trying to free itself. Then the canopy of trees opened into a clearing by a small turquoise lake and Dad parked the truck. A peeling, overturned rowboat lay half-hidden in reeds.

  “Here we are.”

  We got out. A crisp wind rippled across the lake, sending up a faint song from the reeds and grasses.

  “See this tree?” Dad said. It was a big old gnarly fir with a solid branch that curved out from the trunk about eight feet up. “I’ll show you how to make a double lean- to shelter from this tree. You go find a long sturdy branch, one that’ll go from the crook here to about here.”

  I went off into the bush. Leaves dropped from above like large snowflakes, sailing gently down to land on the spongy forest floor. I stood and watched them, the whole woods gently raining dying leaves. Underfoot, the ground felt hollow, a shell of earth covered in dead leaves and fragrant burnt orange pine needles. Below, the tunnelled homes of insects, ants and beetles, then below that, the hollowed bones of animals, layer upon layer, then rock then coal.