Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

  That night I listened to the low rumble of traffic from Granville Street and I tried to pretend it was a river, the Chilcotin in early summer, rushing along with the sun glinting off it. I dipped a tin pot in the flow; it spilled onto my legs. An eagle whistled. I realized that I couldn’t wait to get away, from Vancouver, from Williams Lake, and from the storm of worry that boiled and thundered in the heart of me.

  [ TWENTY-SIX ]

  A CHICKADEE SANG fee-bee below the raucous cry of a raven. A waxwing chirruped high and thin and a woodpecker hammered a nearby tree. Early morning, fresh and cool, and the bush was a jungle of sounds. The sunlight held just the soft breath of the heat it would bring later. I had only what I needed: matches, a tin cooking pot, a flask of water, some teabags, packages of Tang, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, some fishing line and hooks, a coil of rope, a sleeping bag and Dad’s jackknife.

  I went down to the creek and scooped a pot of water. There was no breeze and I easily rekindled last night’s fire and settled the pot between two stones to boil water for tea. I had a handful of strawberries the size of my baby fingernail that I’d collected yesterday. I ate them for breakfast. They were so tart and delicious. I felt the stirrings of the same deep peace I’d felt last night by the fire, watching the constellations take shape in the night sky, the Big Dipper, Orion, Cassiopeia, Perseus. Peace seemed wrong; I felt guilty for feeling it. Still it came again with the familiarity of morning sounds. My mother had disappeared, my sister was in a mental hospital and I was sitting in the shade of an aspen, heating a pot of creek water for tea.

  I had a sleeping bag, the pot, a mug and cutlery set, and a backpack to carry it all. I had money tucked away so that I could buy more food at the store in Duchess Creek. I had decided, like Chiwid, to walk and sleep out. The first day out of Williams Lake, I kept expecting someone to come after me. I didn’t want them to. Mom would not be found by asking someone to lead me to her. I’d have to sneak up on her, like the man in the fir forest that night, who slipped in with the headlights off, leaving her no place to run.

  After breakfast, I packed up my things, doused the fire and scattered the rocks and set out again. I was following the road. As the day began to heat up, I found the creek again and soaked my hair and shirt, let my feet cool in the fast running water. I knew the names of things out here: Canada mint, stinging nettle and horsetail by the water. Nodding onion on a sunny slope, the pale purple flower bending gently. Mallow, lamb’s quarters—you can make a salad from the fresh young leaves. Yarrow for tea. Salsify, plantain, thistle, all along the roadside. You can eat the leaves and stems. Strawberries, you have to have the eye for them, the three leaves low to the ground, the tiny ruby berries. Last year’s rosehips, shrivelled, but still good to chew or put in tea.

  I made camp that evening near a path leading to a swampy lake. In the night I started awake and reached out for something familiar. Sand under my fingers, pebbles, twigs, the night very dark. I listened for what had wakened me. Nothing. Maybe that. That silence—not a breath, not a peep, not a stir. A quiet so soft and full I wanted to stay awake for it.

  The smallest breeze rose and, on it, the scent of woodsmoke. I remembered then that I had dreamed of fire, carried on the wind, racing across the treetops. I was running with the animals, deer and raccoons and squirrels and long-legged birds, fleeing to the creek with flames thundering overhead.

  And then from the woods, a single deep call, an owl. A few seconds later, an answer from another direction.

  Not everything can be a sign. They’re just signalling each other, calling out their territory. They don’t know anything about me or my disappeared mother or how she loved the quiet of the night and sought out the lonely places.

  But the worry crept into the calm of the night and down deep where I kept my darkest fears. Like the silence, there was nothing I could name, nothing that took shape, not yet, but worry billowed and gnawed, grew, and then came the drift of smoke again. That was something to latch onto, a forest fire nearby maybe, or someone camping. Which was worse? Mom feared humans more than bears or wolves or storms. “Which humans?” Jenny had asked. None in particular. Humans are unpredictable.

  Leaves shivered now, softly. Nothing else, though I listened until my heartbeat galloped in my ears. I rolled to the precipice of sleep and jerked awake several times, sweating, sniffing the air, listening. When I woke to daylight, snow was gently floating down through the trees. I blew a flake from my arm. It wasn’t snow, but ash, falling from the sky. Through the aspen leaves the sun was an orange smear, obscured by smoke. A breeze had picked up in the night and blew in ash and the heavy smell of pinesmoke. Somewhere north of here, the forest was on fire.

  I walked through the day. Helicopters cut the quiet, flying north. A man in a big silver car pulled alongside me. His window whirred down and he offered me a ride. “No, thanks anyway,” I said. Hundreds of birds rose from the telephone wire like a cloud, and turned all at once, sweeping across the road, turned again, and wheeled the other way, across the open meadow. Vehicles went by, some with an acknowledging wave of the hand. Some stopped to ask, “You all right?” or “Can I help you any?” But I didn’t take any rides. I had lunch on a rock, the sun beating down on me, insect sound filling the roadside.

  In the late afternoon, a truck came towards me and stopped on the other side of the road.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” Uncle Leslie smiled broadly through his open window. “I was just to Bella Coola. Smoke bothering you?”

  “No. A little,” I said.

  “Where you headed?”

  I couldn’t answer, didn’t know how to answer. I had not so much lied to him about my mother as neglected to tell him the whole story. The truth embarrassed me; it seemed to reflect badly on Jenny and me. The pain was a river I rode; I could not plant my feet in it or it would knock me down.

  “I can take you to Duchess Creek,” he said when I didn’t answer.

  “That’s out of your way.”

  “Maggie,” he said. Just that, but the tenderness in it took me by surprise and something broke in me. Standing there in the falling ash at the side of the road, my knees gave and I sank to the gravel. I began to cry, first like a baby and then like some kind of injured animal and I couldn’t catch my breath and almost toppled over into the dirt from the weight of my backpack. Leslie caught my arm, saying, “Okay now, it’s all right now. Let me help you.”

  He took my pack and put it in the truck then guided me into the cab and closed the door behind me.

  I choked on air, and tears and snot streamed down my face. Leslie sifted through the glove compartment and found some serviettes and handed them to me, saying, “That’s all I have.” I wiped and choked, wiped and choked. He took my hand and held it, tight.

  “It’s all right now,” he repeated, over and over.

  His solid grasp steadied me. Slowly, slowly I returned to firs and aspen, the road ahead, hazy sky.

  We drove west.

  “Not to Duchess Creek,” I said.

  “Find a place to camp?”

  I nodded. Closed my eyes.

  We drove into the canyon south of the river on a lonely road. The land opened up to undulating grassland, an eerie wind slicing paths through the soft grass. Prairie birds wheeled and scolded. Hoodoos cut in sandstone climbed the other side of the river. Leslie pulled in where a log cabin had been abandoned. Its doorway, missing the door, gaped in shadow. Brambles poked up through the porch floorboards.

  “The cabin’s no good now, but I like the spot,” he said. “The smoke isn’t as bad over here.”

  I nodded. The river was a swift silty green and cool air rose from it.

  “It might get a little bit chilly tonight. How’re you set up?”

  “I’ve got a good sleeping bag,” I said.

  “I put my tarp up on the back of the truck and sleep under there. Got a bit of foam for a mattress.” He went about rigging it up and set his propane stove on the
tailgate.

  “Tea or hot chocolate?” he asked.

  “Either is good.”

  I sat by the river. Suddenly I was so tired. This was Mom’s favourite time, the space between day and night when the breeze, if there was one, died down, the sky deepened with green-tinged clarity and the clatter of day hushed. When we were at a lake, she liked to make her after-supper coffee over the fire and take it down to the beach to sit and listen to the water slap softly against the shore.

  Leslie brought me a mug of hot chocolate and sat beside me. We drank in silence, watching the river. After a while, he heated up some beans over a little fire. We ate while the night darkened.

  “Tell you a story,” said Leslie. “How Vern came to live with me.”

  He’d been out to Nistsun to visit his sister and her son. He didn’t like the white man Jolene was living with. “I’ve never liked any of them, truth be told. Superior sons of bitches. But this one was real bad. Violent. Vern had had to call my brother William one night when this piss-ant held the butt of a shotgun against Jolene’s stomach. Poor little guy came running over to William’s house in his underwear, yelling his head off, William said. I couldn’t get that picture out of my head. I went to pay them a visit. Thought to talk some sense into Jolene and get her to turf the guy, with our help of course. What did she see in these guys? I just don’t know. What did she see in herself that made her think she didn’t deserve better?

  “I stayed at William’s place that first night. I was tired from the road and I couldn’t stomach seeing the white guy when I was tired. I was sleeping in the screened porch. It was the longest day of the year. As I said, I was tired from the drive but I couldn’t sleep. Beyond the pines I saw the mountains white capped and shadowed by cloud. I remember I watched the moon rise over the mountain and fill the clouds with silver light. I heard howling and wondered if it was a wolf. Something was knocking against the side of the porch in the wind. Next thing I knew, I found myself standing outside Jolene’s house in the moonlight. A small blue bird flung itself against the bedroom window again and again. It was trapped inside. I moved to the living-room window and looked in. In the middle of the floor, a wolf was bent over a deer carcass, tearing chunks from her ribcage. The doe’s neck stretched towards me and she opened her eyes and looked at me—not afraid but so soft and pitiful.

  “I saw a shovel leaning against the step and hefted it, ready to smash the window. Then I woke up in the bed in William’s porch. My heart was going ninety miles an hour. The moon had gone down again and so had the wind.

  “I got up and went inside the house. I wanted to ask William what he thought about the dream, but he was asleep. So I put on my pants and shoes and I walked across the reserve to Jolene’s house. I had no idea what time it was, but the reserve was quiet so I knew it must be late. She lived up close to the bush—you remember—and as I got closer, a long, lonely howl played out somewhere nearby in the hills and this time it really was a wolf. It sounded so forlorn, I felt a chill. I could see light from the living-room window spilling out on the dirt in front of Jolene’s house. I heard shouting, a scream, maybe Jolene. A few vehicles were parked out front. I had a hell of a dread of what I would find. It was just like my dream. There was the shovel, leaning against the step, and I picked it up. I didn’t stop to look in the window or knock, I just walked right in.

  “Jeez, they were surprised. He had some other guy by the hair. White guys, both of them. Some others were half passed out at the table.

  “ ‘I’ll scalp ya, swear to god you try that again, you fuck.’ That was him, pardon my language. I remember the way he talked. There was nothing good in him, nothing. I held the shovel up, ready to swing. Their mouths dropped open. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Jolene said. I must have looked like a ghost. ‘I’m taking the boy,’ I said. No one tried to stop me. No one said anything.

  “I still remember carrying him in my arms down the road. He woke up and said my name then fell back to sleep. Little Vern. God, I loved him. That wolf took up again and some others joined in and they howled us all the way home. He slept that night in the porch, curled up beside me. I worried for Jolene, but I knew I’d done what I could for her by taking her son out of there.”

  Uncle Leslie leaned over and put a few more sticks on the fire.

  “I tried to protect him. He missed his mom, but I couldn’t let him go back there. Sometimes I wondered if I had the right. I still don’t know.”

  After a while I said, “Jenny had her baby. She named her Sunny. She’s keeping her.” I told him about the nuns and Jenny’s paranoia and her visions of girls with bloody nightgowns and baby-stealers. “Jenny needs Mom. She’s just a girl and I don’t know what to do for her. She needs her mother.”

  “And you’re looking for her?”

  “Yes,” I said, and he didn’t ask me anything more.

  Uncle Leslie put out the fire and I tucked my sleeping bag alongside a boulder near the truck.

  “You’re going to be okay there?” he asked.

  “Yeah. As long as it doesn’t rain.”

  “It won’t rain tonight. You sleep well, then, Maggie. If you need anything, anything at all, just call out. I’m not a heavy sleeper.”

  “Okay. Uncle Leslie?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re like my own niece. Sleep well.”

  I thought I would be able to sleep. I wasn’t afraid and I wasn’t cold, at least not at first. The stars were bright in spite of the smoke; the rhythmic rushing of the river drowned out any other night sounds, except the higher pitch of crickets singing from the grass. But my mind ticked and twitched at the edge of sleep. I had a picture of Uncle Leslie carrying little Vern through the wolf howls. I saw the little body curled into the protective arms of the bigger one. Then it was me carrying Cinnamon, her tiny body warming me. Each time I opened my eyes, the moon was a little higher and the air a little colder. Something large was down at the river, splashing and huffing. I was cold now. I got up and went to the tailgate of the truck. Just stood there.

  “Cold?” Leslie said, as if he’d been awake the whole time too.

  “Yes.”

  “Come in here, then.”

  Leslie made room for me beside him and I crawled in with my sleeping bag, firewood and lawn chairs on one side of me and Uncle Leslie on the other.

  “Go to sleep,” he said and his arms folded over me like I was a little girl.

  [ TWENTY-SEVEN ]

  SMOKE FROM THE forest fire had settled over the region. There was no wind and the sun hung above the trees, a pale orange disc. Leslie stopped at the end of the driveway of our old house in Duchess Creek.

  “Doesn’t look like anyone’s living there,” he said, and we laughed. The porch had caved in on one side and the window of Jenny’s and my room was broken. The hydro wire looked to be sagging almost to the ground.

  I lifted my knapsack and got out.

  “I’ll make a few inquiries, if it’s okay with you,” Leslie said.

  I nodded, set off down the driveway. When I looked back, he was still sitting there. He waved and put the truck into gear.

  I left my pack near the spruce tree. What had once been a scraggly front yard had been returned to the wild. Deer scat nestled in tufts of grass here and there. They grazed here, on the wild rose bushes. The roof that Mom and Rita and I had once fixed was missing shingles; those that were left had rotted in the heat and cold of the seasons.

  It wasn’t a house built by people who meant to stay, as Mom used to say.

  The door was unlocked. Inside, the house still smelled of old wallboard and mouldering insulation. But our family’s smell was gone. The house had been scavenged of almost everything. The Formica table and chairs were gone; so was Dad’s green chair and the beds in our room. The only thing left was the woodstove and Mom and Dad’s bed. I pushed open the bedroom door. A film of dust coated the mattress. On Mom’s side, a blood stain the size of a quarter.
Spiders had stuck the folds of the curtains together with their webs; they crackled as I parted them to look out the window.

  And then I caught a whiff of her lipstick, the briefest breath of that drugstore cosmetic-counter sweetness. I raised my head to breathe it in deep. Then the acrid scent of the forest fire billowed in on the breeze. Except there was no breeze. I turned to see if I had left the door open. I hadn’t.

  I swear she was there. I know that sounds crazy, but it felt as though she’d taken my hand in hers. It felt so good, I started to cry again and I heard her voice, telling me to shush now, Maggie-girl. I sat on the bed and it stayed with me, that feeling of her being there with me. I thought of phoning Jenny to tell her, but I thought, what would that do, two of us off our rockers and hearing things?

  I slept that night in that haunted house. I know that sounds crazy, too, but I wanted her to come back. Any minute she would be real, her footsteps crunching in the driveway.

  But in the morning it was Agnes who came, in a sky blue cotton dress dotted with red flowers and wearing jeans underneath it, just like she used to.

  She said she had wondered if she’d ever see me again and then she swallowed hard and her eyes glistened. “I’m getting so old, I cry when I’m happy now,” she said. She wiped tears from her cheeks.

  “You’re not old,” I said and hugged her. She felt thin in my arms and she held on after I went to pull away. Her chest heaved with the effort of not crying. It felt strange, me comforting her as if she was a child. But I wasn’t comforting her, really. I was thanking her, though I couldn’t say the words.

  “I’m canning fish,” she said, ducking her head to try and hide new tears. “Come over and help me.”