Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

  I picked up a branch. It felt hollow in my hands and when I cracked it against the side of a tree it flew into pieces. Deeper in, I came across a tangle of deadfall. I took up an aspen limb, thick enough, and pulled it from the tangle. It was about twelve feet long, still greenish, not brittle. A high wind rose and shivered through the trees. I turned and looked for the lake. Through the leaves, sun glinted on water.

  When I got back, Dad was sitting on the hood of the truck smoking, his red curls fluttering like the fall leaves.

  “Good job, Maggie,” he said. “That’s perfect.” He jumped down from the truck, put out his cigarette and put the butt back in the package.

  “A lean- to is one of the easiest shelters to build. But this one has an extra wall,” Dad said. “We don’t need it to be very big, so we’ll put the ridgepole right about here. Now what are you going to look for?”

  “The sun. Face the door east for the morning sun.”

  “That’s right. You want that warmth to hit you as early as possible.” Dad set the ridgepole tightly into the V of the tree. “But we’re going to make it a little more to south so we can look out at the lake. Now what else?”

  “Make sure there’s no overhanging dead branches and we’re not near any landslide danger.”

  “Anything like that around here?”

  “No.”

  “Right. This is a perfect little spot at the edge of this clearing here. The bush behind us, the lake in front, but not too close. We don’t want animals stumbling over us on their way to get a drink.”

  Dad placed one of the branches he had gathered against the ridgepole. “It doesn’t matter if they stick up,” he said. “It makes it stronger.” We worked quietly in the autumn sun, laying branches to make the walls of the shelter. After a while, a cold wind blew up and drummed at our bare hands and faces. When I went to get more branches, I squatted for a minute against the lee side of a pine out of the wind, the sun on my face and the sweet warm spice of bark and forest rising up around me.

  I couldn’t wait to be done the shelter and climb inside away from the wind. But Dad was methodical and, even though we were only building the shelter for this afternoon, he would make sure it was near perfect.

  “Know why I came to this country?” he said, as we worked.

  “You’d had enough of Ireland.”

  “Yes, but I could have stayed in the States. I got a job logging in Oregon. I made pretty good money. For Christmas I went to Portland to spend some of it. In a little bar I heard a musician named Pete Seeger, singing about the draft. I’d read in the paper that they were going to call up fifty thousand young men for the army. That was the Korean conflict. I didn’t leave Ireland to get caught up in someone else’s war.

  “When I went back to work, I met a fellow who told me his grandfather had been a chief of one of the great tribes near Bella Coola. They were like the kings and queens of the land back then. So much wealth, they gave it away just to show how wealthy they were. But the government came along and outlawed all that, their language, their religion, their old songs and dances. I told him it was just like in Ireland.

  “His mother had married into the Ulkatcho band. He said if I went almost straight north of where we were in Oregon, and just kept going, I’d find the place where he grew up. There was a network of trails the people had made over hundreds of years, from Bella Coola to Williams Lake, and they moved along those trails following the food and the seasons. You never had to go hungry as long as you knew what you were doing. As long as you had your freedom, you could find game, berries, fish. It was a land of plenty. Make your way to the coast and you’ve got nature’s grocery, free for the taking: cockles and clams and salmon. So I came. I listened and I watched. That’s how you learn to do it.”

  When he felt satisfied that the pine bough walls would repel a light rain and heavy dew, if not a downpour, he said, “Let’s try her out.” We backed into the opening, one of us on either side of the supporting tree, until just our heads were poking out.

  “If you ever get lost, this is what you do first. You build yourself a little shelter. Don’t forget.”

  I couldn’t forget. He told me the same thing every time we went into the bush.

  “And oh, I almost forgot.” He took a bottle of Orange Crush from inside his jacket and handed it to me. Then he brought out a beer for himself. He fished deeper in his inside pocket and brought out a package wrapped in a dishcloth. “Then you eat your chocolate biscuits.”

  —

  Some people believe that a person knows when he’s going to die. Even if he’s not sick, even if death comes out of nowhere like a deer on the highway. I don’t know about that. But sometimes I think about it when I remember this afternoon with my father.

  The pop chilled me, but I drank it, shivering, because he’d brought it for me. Dad cracked open his beer and had a few slow sips as we watched the lake rippling in the wind. He said, “You know, Maggie, I’m not fond of talking. You know that, don’t you? Nothing I think about seems worth saying when I think twice about it. Your mother doesn’t understand that.”

  He took a sip of beer and smiled at me. The right fish bait to use, the name of the bird trilling an unfamiliar song, these were the things Dad usually told me. I didn’t know if I was supposed to say anything or not.

  “You know on a sunny afternoon when we sit outside against the house and the sun is warming us? I look at her and she looks lit up. Her skin, her hair and everything. And then I feel it. Like a little fish flipping on the bottom of the boat. It makes me want to celebrate. I want to get a cold beer and forget about the rest of the day. Make a toast, to her.

  “And if I could just spit it out, the way I see her. But I never do. The words just don’t seem good enough. And when I go and get a beer, I spoil everything. You know that look she gets?”

  He took a long swallow.

  “She never says anything, bless her. I can tell she’s trying to keep the smile on her face. And I know I’m going to spoil everything, but I can’t help myself. Now why is that?”

  Did he want me to answer? I held the Orange Crush to my lips, took a gulp, and studied the backwash as it foamed into the bottle.

  “My father, your grandfather, he was the same. No, he was worse. I swore I’d never become a drunk like him. And I never did. I’m my own kind of drunk.”

  He tipped the neck of his beer at me, and said “cheers.” I clinked my Orange Crush bottle into his, the way we always did.

  I had never seen Dad drunk like Helmer, laughing loudly at jokes that weren’t that funny, then turning weepy, then suddenly mean and the other men trying to calm him down. My mother hated that maudlin weakness in a man and I suppose if Dad had been that kind of drunk, she wouldn’t have married him. “It goes from funny to pitiful to mean pretty quick,” she said.

  But there were those nights when Mom went to bed without him, after her low, pleading voice came through our bedroom wall and his turned insistent: “I’m just enjoying myself here, Irene.” I could hear Mom’s anger in the slam of a dresser drawer, the rattle of hangers in her closet. I wondered what kept him sitting there by the stove all by himself. Sometimes he sang softly, “Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams.” His shaky, whispery voice made me smile, but it didn’t have that effect on Mom.

  When he started in on his Irish songs it made Mom cry. Once I heard her say, “You remind me of my dad.” I didn’t see why his singing would make her cry. I was mad at her for leaving him alone and for being angry at him. Why wouldn’t she sing with him and have fun, like he wanted?

  And there was the day when Dad, his friend Panbread and Mom were playing darts against the side of the house. I could hear Dad teasing Mom about something. Next thing I knew, Mom was telling Jenny and me to get our shoes on because we were going for a walk. She went in the house to get us some apples for the road and baseball caps to keep the sun off.

  Dad called after her, “Aw, come on Irene, finish the game at
least.”

  I heard Panbread say, “Let her go, Pat. That’s women for you.” Then they both laughed, too hard and too long, and I was glad that Mom was in the house and couldn’t hear them.

  Mom set a blistering pace through the woods, then slowed as we picked our way up a dry creekbed. I stopped so often to pick up smooth rocks that Jenny was way ahead of me, out of sight, and Mom was a long way past her. The sun burned down on the creekbed. I caught glimpses of hummingbirds hovering over orange Indian paintbrush. A woodpecker drummed against a tree. The sun, the hollow drumming reverberating through the firs, the soft clacking of my running shoes against stones wrapped me in a cocoon. Some part of me was looking down at myself, moving along the creek. A narrow trickle of water wove its way through the stones. When the tips of my running shoes turned dark from the water, I raised my eyes and there were trembling Saskatoon bushes, bright white daisies and turquoise sky. I felt as if I had wakened from a dream.

  Then I heard Mom calling me. “Ma-ggie!” the two-note fee-bee, like a chickadee. “Ma-ggie! Come on. We’re over here.”

  I followed a skinny deer path through the brush and over a little rise. There was Mom, up to her neck in a clear green-blue lake. Jenny was jumping up and down with excitement in the mud, naked except for her baseball cap, her long red hair sticking out from under it.

  “Guess what?” Mom called.

  “What?”

  “It’s not deep!” and she threw her arms up and burst splashing from the water like a jumping fish. It was only waist-deep on Mom who was naked too, her clothes dumped in the grass beside Jenny.

  “Hurry up!” Jenny yelled at me, and laughed as she ran into the water with her baseball cap still on.

  I remember that sweet, bone-tired exhaustion we got from playing in the water for hours. We had to duck under the water to escape the horseflies. We held contests: chasing each other in the shallows, our hands in the mud pushing us along; who could stay sitting upright on a floating log the longest; who could hold her breath longer; who could spring out of the water and into the air higher. We dried off on a big boulder in the sun, with the warm stone under our cheeks, then back into the water again to cool off, yelling at Mom to watch from where she was lying on our clothes in the grass, her smooth hip curved into her waist and one brown-nippled breast resting against the other.

  By the time we dragged ourselves within sight of home that evening, the summer sky had darkened to purple. Our legs felt like rubber from the long walk and we couldn’t stop giggling, because we were all tired and scratching in fits at ourselves. Along with mosquito bites, we’d got some kind of swimmer’s itch from the lake.

  “We’ll have to have baths,” Mom said. “Then we’ll put some calamine lotion on.”

  Jenny led the way to the front step. “Dad,” she said, and stopped. She’d nearly stepped on him. He was curled up on the grass at the foot of the steps with a toppled kitchen chair beside him.

  “Go in the house,” Mom said.

  “Is he all right?’ Jenny asked.

  “Go on in the house, Jenny, Maggie. Go on!”

  Jenny and I went inside, but we stood near the door and watched.

  Mom had him half off the ground, hauling on him to get him up. But he slipped through her arms and slumped back to the grass.

  “For Christ’s sake, Patrick! Come in the house.”

  It was one of the few times I heard my mother swear and it scared me. Though we only went to church at Easter and Christmas, she considered herself a good Catholic and God-related curses were strictly forbidden in our house.

  “What’s the problem, Irene?” my dad said, suddenly awake.

  “Get in the house. Go to bed.”

  “Calm down, calm down. I was just getting some air.” He shook free of her and waltzed into the house, winking at Jenny and me as he went by.

  Mom let him go. She sat on the step, her back to us.

  “I’m itchy,” Jenny said after a few minutes.

  Mom pushed herself up and went to pump water for our bath.

  [ FOUR ]

  ONE MORNING IN JUNE, when I was ten, Mom called Jenny and me to the door to watch the Indians from Duchess Creek Reserve heading to Potato Mountain, where they’d camp and harvest wild potatoes.

  “Used to be a lot more of them,” Mom said, leaned against the door, watching. “Big caravans, like you’d imagine crossing the desert. When I was a kid they used to take the trail right behind our cabin. When my dad saw them headed to Potato Mountain, he’d get antsy. He wanted to go up there, too. The Indians used to move around more back then, for fishing and hunting.”

  It still seemed like a lot of people to me, more than I ever saw when we rode our bikes around the reserve. Where had they all come from? They had their horses loaded down with packs and tools and bedding. Some of the horses had five-gallon cans strapped to their backs. These were to bring back the potatoes they would dig. A long string of dogs trotted along behind the horses. A team pulled a Bennett-wagon, made from the frame of an old car, with old folks and kids riding in it, some of them holding even littler babies.

  When Mom raised her hand to wave, a woman left the group and came walking up the driveway. She was about Mom’s age, with long hair as shiny black as a crow’s wing and wearing a purple-flowered print dress over her pants. Even with the pants, I could see her legs were thin and a little bowed. But she walked like I imagined a ballerina would walk, graceful, her toes touching down first, lightly, on the gravel.

  “Agnes,” Mom acknowledged.

  “Brought your moccasins,” the woman said. She had a soft whispery voice and a way of cocking her head, like she was shy. Jenny, sitting next to me, pinched my arm as a warning. When I looked up at Agnes’s face, I gasped. Her lip had a mashed gap in it that joined her nose in what looked like an open wound. She smiled at Jenny and me kindly and I felt my face flush in embarrassment for reacting.

  “You remembered,” my mother said. She took the moccasins from Agnes, a large pair made of soft moosehide, beaded with blue and orange and white beads. Dad’s birthday was coming. “Get my purse, Maggie.”

  I realized that Agnes was the woman Glenna sometimes talked about. “I feel so sorry for the poor thing,” I’d heard her say. “She says no one will marry her because of the harelip. And you know she’s probably right.”

  Mom never agreed with Glenna about Agnes. “I think she does all right. There’s something about that woman that’s made of steel.”

  I’d also overheard Glenna talking to my mom about the time Agnes came to the nursing station with bruises on her face. “And with that harelip. What a mess!” The man who had promised to marry Agnes had done it. My mother called it rape, a word I didn’t know then, and she and Glenna had argued about the word. “But can you call it rape?” Glenna asked, and my mother had gotten angry.

  As for me, I had not understood how something so minor as a harelip, which I had pictured as a kind of soft mustache, could have such an impact, and I thought this was something maybe peculiar to Indian men, this dislike of hair, like some of the other traits that they were supposed to have, like never allowing themselves to be rushed, or spending money as fast as they got it.

  I brought the purse back and handed it to Mom, deliberately looking in Agnes’s face to let her know I wasn’t bothered.

  “Bring back potatoes for you girls,” she said, as if she was telling us a secret, and she smiled again.

  “Thank you,” Jenny and I said.

  We watched her go. Her long hair swung gently down her back as she picked her way carefully along the road to rejoin the caravan.

  “Some years Dad would get up to Potato Mountain,” Mom said then. “He went looking for cattle but he stayed to race horses.” She rarely talked about her parents. Her mom had died when she was little, and her dad wanted to be a cowboy, not a father, that’s what she said. “Mom went with him once. They joined the Indians camping one night. She said she’d never seen so many wildflowers as she did in
the meadows they passed through on the ride up: Indian paintbrush and yellow balsamroot and blue mountain lupines covering the hills. And then at the top, the blankets of white potato flowers. She only went that once, but she talked about it as if she’d gone every year. She would say, ‘I remember that mountain covered in little white flowers.’ ” Mom made her voice wistful, teasing: “ ‘And the berries. So many you couldn’t pick them all. Dik. That’s what the Indians called them. We ate dik and wild potatoes, this big, the size of my thumbnail, and deer meat cooked over the fire. And at night the stars were so thick. As thick as the white flowers covering the hills. We slept outside under the stars. I say slept. The music and singing and dancing all night, who could sleep? You couldn’t imagine all the stars.’ And then when she got fed up with us, with the snow, and being trapped in the cabin all day, she used to say, ‘I wish I could go to Potato Mountain. I want to see those wild flowers one more time before I die.’ ”

  “And did she?” I asked.

  “No, she never did get back up that mountain.”

  “I wish I could go to Potato Mountain,” Jenny said. “Instead of going to school. All those kids are skipping the end of school. Lucky ducks.”

  “I don’t think I’d like it now. I used to want to go,” Mom said, still watching the caravan, the horses’ hooves sending up little puffs of dust. “Too much drinking now, from what I’ve heard.” She looked away and to the house, then added, “That might not be true. That’s just what people say.”

  That night I had a dream that Mom, Jenny and I were getting ready to go up Potato Mountain. We were outside packing the car, even though in real life you couldn’t get up the mountain in a car. We came in and out of the house with our suitcases and blankets while Dad sat in his green vinyl chair by the stove.

  “Isn’t Dad coming?” I asked Mom.

  “No, he’s not strong enough. He’d never make it up that mountain.”

  I felt so sorry for him. Mom was right; he was only a little boy and he’d hold us all back. I looked at him sleeping in the chair. Then it hit me: he was not sleeping at all—he was dead. The shock of it woke me up.