Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

  We drove over to her house, and I watched her graceful gait, maybe a little tentative and pained as she climbed the steps, though she wouldn’t be forty yet.

  “I’ve got a touch of arthritis,” she said, feeling my eyes on her. “I’m too young for that!”

  In the house, she put the kettle on. “Have you come to make an honest woman of me?”

  “Honest woman?”

  “How many years ago did I promise to take you to Potato Mountain?”

  “Four or five.”

  “Let’s go tomorrow then,” she said. “We’ll have to put together a few things. We can take some of this fish.”

  “I don’t want to mess up your plans.”

  “You’re not going to believe the flowers we’ll see up there. This is the time of year to go.”

  “Really, Agnes? Are you sure?”

  Agnes started to laugh. She picked up the teapot and carried it to the sink and she stood there looking out the window, her shoulders shaking.

  “Do you have a sleeping bag?” she said, still looking out the window.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” She wiped her eyes and turned to me again. “We’ll just take one little bag each. Sleeping bags. Some food, some water. Matches. A little tarp. Who did I lend that tarp to? Oh, you’re going to love it up there. I haven’t been in three or four years, I don’t know why. You just forget how much you need to go.”

  When we got to the end of the road in the cool morning, a horse stood waiting, tethered to a fence. She flicked her tail and whinnied softly when she saw us.

  Agnes patted her nose and fed her an apple. “This is Linda. She’ll carry our gear for us. You can ride her for a while if you want. Gotta watch the steep parts, though.”

  I shook my head. We left the sunshine and headed into the shade of the trees. We walked in single file, the horse snuffing her breaths and her tail swishing softly. We passed a big old pine and stopped to stare up at the deep fissures of its orange bark. The purple of Jacob’s ladder pushed through ferns. Grasses poked from rock and, in breaks in the shade, patches of yellow balsamroot glowed in the morning sun. We climbed and the pines grew smaller, the aspens brushier and the meadow opened up, green and awash with flowers. The sun poured down, lighting the Indian paintbrush, the balsamroot and silver skeletons of pines, twisting amid the grass.

  Agnes stopped to rest on a rock beside the trail. Warm now, I took off my jacket and looked out across the valley and the snow still lying on the mountaintops, white blending to ragged white cloud. But above us, farther up the trail that wound through the meadow, the sky was friendly, unforgettable turquoise brightened by sunlight, and the mountain was softened and gentle. Wild onion tanged the air. Agnes named the plants for me: violet, speedwell, buttercup, saskatoon, kinnikinnick, saxifrage, meadow rue, foxglove, columbine, strawberry, arnica, forget-me-not, soopollalie.

  Soopollalie, soopollalie.

  “We make Indian ice cream from that one,” Agnes said. “The berries whip up like soap suds. That’s the name, I guess.”

  A spell had been cast, or had one been broken? Here on the mountain, the sun pouring down, birdsong, wild onion and pine, among familiar flowers, things I could name and words I understood.

  We had lunch on the mountaintop, looking out across the valley and the lake below. Later, settled around the fire in our little camp, Agnes told me the story she knew.

  “I met your mother in Williams Lake when we were teenagers. Her mother had died—I don’t know when—she was little, I guess. Her father was a cowboy. He came up from the States somewhere, didn’t know a thing about ranching—that’s what people said. But he was a fast learner. My dad and him worked some ranches together. He came to love that life, I guess. But he never knew quite what to do with Irene. Especially when she grew to a teenager. She was a little wild, you know. And beautiful. You know that. Her dad sent her to high school in Williams Lake and she didn’t see much of him after that. I know, because holiday time everybody went home, but Irene stayed, and if there was no car at home, I stayed, too, with my old aunty. She was kind of dotty, sat in a chair in her room all day long, looking out that window at the mountains to the west. I suppose she was homesick, too, come to think of it. I made her meals, brought them to her on a tray. It was lonely sometimes.

  “It was a Friday after school. Irene was walking behind me. I knew she was there. That was a holiday weekend, Thanksgiving, a long weekend. You didn’t like those too much if you couldn’t go home. ‘You have beautiful hair,’ I heard her say. I didn’t turn around right away. What if she was talking to somebody else? But I knew it was me she was talking to. I was older than her—we weren’t in the same grade. She ran to catch up with me. ‘You have beautiful hair,’ she said again. ‘Do you do use something special on it?’ I told her it was eggs. She looked at me with this funny look, like she thought I was kidding. Then she burst out laughing. I just stared at her, and then I started laughing too. My god, we laughed. Laughed till we cried. What was so damn funny, I don’t know.

  “But I invited her to my aunty’s house in town. We made a big turkey dinner for just the three of us. My old aunty ate like a bird, just a bit of white meat and a tablespoon of mashed potatoes. So really, it was just for your mom and me. We made the stuffing, we made a mountain of potatoes, turnips, cranberry sauce, cauliflower with the cheese sauce. Pumpkin pie and whipped cream. Spent my aunty’s money on all those groceries. We put a white tablecloth on the table and used my aunty’s good dishes. We had to wash them first, they hadn’t been used for so long—you know, the gravy boat, the platters, she had all of that. I don’t know what possessed us, just the two of us and all that trouble, all that food. We were at it the whole day and night. We were still doing dishes after midnight. But, boy, we sure had fun. Your mom, she had that spirit in her—just up and do something, just because.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “We stayed friends after that. But we didn’t run with the same bunch. Irene was in with a drinking crowd. Not that she did much of that herself. But she tolerated it. I couldn’t stand to be around it. Look what it did to so many of our people. Just wrecked them. Wrecked plenty of whites, too, but there’s more of them, so you don’t notice so much.”

  The fire had burned down so I put on more wood and poked it to life again.

  “Can I ask you something, Agnes?”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “Was my dad a drinker?”

  “I didn’t know your dad too well.” She stared into the fire and I thought that was the end of it. She took up a stick and rearranged the embers so the fire flared and lit up her face.

  “Some men think if they don’t do anything bad, you know, like beating the wife or kids or yelling at them, where’s the harm? Some men just open that bottle and in they go. They disappear. Maybe that’s worse. Maybe harder for the women.”

  We sat in silence. The fire popped and spit bright embers on the ground and we stomped out the big ones.

  “Your mother didn’t finish high school. She didn’t like living in town. She took off halfway through grade eleven. I heard she went to Bella Coola, got a job in a restaurant or motel or something. She was only sixteen or so. She met a man there.”

  I felt my stomach tighten.

  “Name of Emil Deschamps. Métis fellow from the Prairies. He had a fishing boat and she got a job fishing with him.” Agnes laughed. “Imagine that. That’s going to go one of two ways. I guess they fell in love. I guess maybe Emil was in love with her when he asked her to go out on his boat. I saw him once in Duchess Creek on his way through to Williams Lake or somewhere. Irene told me who he was. He was a handsome man, shiny black hair, curly, kind of tall, nice smile. Had a big old car. Maybe a Pontiac.”

  “Was Mom with him then?”

  “Not at that time, no. But she told me they took that boat out and went to the most beautiful places, islands and beaches. She told me I would love to see it. She told me we should go sometime and I thought
I might, she made it sound so good. But I didn’t. She didn’t either, as far as I know. She was married to Patrick. She had little Jenny. That would have been 1959, because my dad died that year. Irene loved being a mother.”

  I looked up at the sky and there was the riot of stars that my grandmother had missed so much.

  I spoke slowly. “She did love being a mother, didn’t she?”

  “She told me so, Maggie.”

  “Well then I don’t understand.”

  “No,” said Agnes.

  “I’m looking for her. I’m out here looking for her. Jenny needs her. But I don’t really want to find her. I know that’s a terrible thing to say. But what would it mean if we found her, alive somewhere, living her life?”

  “No,” said Agnes again.

  A star shot across the sky just above the trees. I breathed in quickly. Then another followed, a brightness disappearing.

  “You need to go see Rita,” said Agnes.

  [ TWENTY-EIGHT ]

  UNCLE LESLIE WAS waiting for us when we got back to Agnes’s house.

  “I found her car,” he said.

  “Come on in,” said Agnes, and we went inside where she made tea. She brought out biscuits and homemade jam and we sat at the kitchen table.

  “I asked around about your mom,” Uncle Leslie began again. “A fellow over here said, ‘That lady with the red hair that drove the Chevy station wagon?’ He said he knew a guy who bought the car about three years ago. Over near Dultso. So I drove over to see him. He said he bought it from a man, dark-haired guy, maybe Japanese, he said. Told him the car had been well cared-for by his wife. And it was. Still in beautiful shape. I bought it from him.”

  Agnes started to laugh.

  “You what?” I said.

  “You in need of another car?” Agnes said.

  “I bought it for you, Maggie. You’re going to need a car, you and Jenny and the baby. You can’t be hitchhiking around the countryside with a baby.”

  “Uncle Leslie, I …”

  “No, don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear it. By rights the car is yours. And I got it for a song.”

  I called Jenny from Agnes’s house. She sounded so much better, the worry that clutched my stomach uncoiled a little.

  “She’s a happy baby,” Jenny said.

  “Like her name.”

  “It makes it easier for me. Sister Anne got us a stroller. Ginger calls it a pram. We’ve been out walking. The roses are all in bloom. But I can’t wait to come home.”

  I swallowed. What did she mean?

  “Mag?”

  “Yeah, I know, Jenny. Hey, you won’t believe this.” And I told her about the car.

  “That old car,” Jenny said. “I loved that car.”

  Driving in that car with Mom always felt like escaping. We hit the road with no one to answer to. We were unaccountable and unaccounted for. There were strings of days when even Dad wouldn’t know where to find us. Powdered milk and canned meat, no toilets, no beds or doors.

  I used to pity the people we passed along the way, especially the women. I pitied Mrs. Duncan yawning behind the counter at the Nakenitses Lake store. As I paid for my Orange Crush, I could feel in her eyes that she wanted to escape, too. Sometimes I said to Mom, “Do you think she’s jealous?”

  “Sure she is. Who wouldn’t be?” she always said and I wonder now if she was serious. I should ask Jenny, but at the time, I believed her.

  We napped under the sheltering branches of giant spruce trees and made tea from rosehips and spruce needles, and sweetened it with honey. Mom kept some one-gallon glass jugs in the car and she knew where there were springs grown round with graceful willow. We knelt in the thick moss and caught the water in the jugs as it bubbled out. We swam naked in remote lakes and creeks. We sunbathed on warm rock, like wood nymphs, Mom said. Sometimes she called Jenny and me “the little people.”

  “Who are the little people?” Jenny asked.

  “They’re the secret ones who live in an underground world that can only be entered at the water’s edge. They like it if you leave them little gifts of candy and cloth.” Sometimes she gave us a bright kerchief to tie to a branch near the water.

  “But you don’t want to get too friendly with them,” she warned. “If you do, they’ll steal you away to live with them for seven years.”

  And then, when we returned to the car, there was the sun-baked vinyl smell of it, the warmth, like a nest.

  Uncle Leslie brought the car over to Agnes’s. I wanted to be happy to see it, but any trip we made now in the station wagon would not be an escape. A net of memory was tightening around me.

  [ TWENTY-NINE ]

  THE YARD WAS THE SAME as I remembered it—chickens scattered as we drove in. The grass was as green as it would get all season. In the shade of a row of crab apple trees, Rita looked up from digging and rested her foot on her shovel. I thought her mouth fell open a little when she saw the car. I waved and Uncle Leslie cut the engine. My stomach twisted.

  I got out of the car.

  “I’ll come back in a while,” he said, and I almost laughed. Was he scared of Rita, too?

  As he pulled out of the driveway, Rita ran her hand through her hair then thrust the shovel into the earth and came towards me.

  “Aunt Rita,” I said, before I thought about how it would sound.

  She breathed in sharply. “Margaret,” she said. She stood there in the sun, dumbfounded and flustered. I thought to hug her but I was waiting to see which emotion her clouded face would settle on.

  “It’s been a long time,” I said into the awkwardness.

  She laughed drily. “Bit of an understatement.”

  “Who’s your driver?” she asked, but she was looking over at the shovel sticking up in the dirt.

  I had the urge to back up slowly, the way you’re supposed to if you meet a bear, throw something down to distract her, run.

  “He’s from Williams Lake.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “Leslie. Leslie George.”

  “I guess I could use a break. Would you like some coffee?” she said, finally turning her head to me.

  Inside, the house was the same. The woodstove that separated the kitchen and living-room areas, kindling neatly stacked in a box beside it, the same big old dining room table cluttered with mail and newspapers, where Jenny and I had done our homework, the sagging couch, the braided rug. So much had changed for Jenny and me, but Rita had settled into her life a long time ago. I envied that. Change would be an irritant to Rita now, and I was bringing it, like a cold wind funnelling up the valley.

  Rita went to the kitchen cupboard and took down the coffee tin.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked.

  “I’m camping.”

  She hesitated, just a second too long. “Stay here.”

  “I don’t want to be any trouble.”

  “Oh for god sakes.” She rattled the coffee pot on the stove. “I meant for the night, not forever.”

  “I know,” I said. No excuse came readily to mind and there was no turning back. The last time I’d seen Rita, we’d left in a hurry in the middle of the night. She had not forgotten.

  We took our coffee mugs and sat in lawn chairs on the porch. The boards had that soft silver sheen I remembered. I had sat here watching for Mom and brushing my fingers back and forth along the grain of the weathered wood.

  A clumsy silence wrapped us. Rita looked out at the road, I looked at her. Her mouth seemed tighter and the skin around her eyes and neck looser. Her fine blonde hair was shorter, but cut in the same plain way, straight bangs, the rest just grazing her shoulders. I tried to remember the way she had been, the face that had drawn Mom to her—a wide-open frankness and a crease of mischief around the eyes.

  “Where are you living?” Rita asked.

  “Williams Lake. But Jenny’s in Vancouver.” I was about to blurt it all out, but Rita cut me off.

  “Good for you.” Her voice was flat,
just a semi-tone off a taunt. “How long have you been there?”

  “Let’s see. I guess it’s about three years.”

  She looked surprised. Was it possible that she knew nothing about where we’d been since we left her? I decided not to tell her about Jenny right away. Maybe I wouldn’t tell her at all.

  “I’ve got some horses since you were here last. Would you like to see them?”

  “Okay.”

  “Listen Margaret,” she said. “I can’t stand the polite chit-chat. You came here for a reason, and soon enough I’ll find out what it is. But for now, let’s cut the crap and go see some horses.”

  Ten deep breaths, I heard Dad say, to keep from panicking in a survival situation. I breathed deeply.

  Rita took an apple from her jacket and handed it to me. “Last year’s,” she said. “They’ll take it.” And so we walked down to the corral and I fed the horses and they nuzzled their soft noses against me.

  When Uncle Leslie came back, I told him I’d stay a couple of days. He nodded to Rita and she nodded back. As he drove away again, she said, “Family friend?”

  “My friend,” I said, and it was only then that it dawned on me that Rita was waiting for me to tell her about Mom as much as I was waiting for her to do the same for me.

  I helped Rita finish transplanting some lilacs, while the afternoon sun brightened the snow that still held high in the mountains across the lake. Then she said, “I’ve got about two cords of wood to stack. When’s the last time you did any hard work?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “Then I’m doing you a favour.”

  We bent and tossed, bent and tossed and I remembered those fall days after Dad died, Rita and Mom stacking wood and singing. I had the feeling I was walking backwards through our lives and that I would knock up against something suddenly that would make sense.

  Later, we fried a chicken and ate that with mashed potatoes and peas.

  “Everything on the table is grown here,” Rita said.

  “Good for you,” I said, in the same tone she’d used with me. And she smiled.