“No it’s not. You’ve got talent.”
“I’m crap.”
“You give up too fast.”
“Shut up.”
“Why don’t you apply at Lakehead? You could get in for the winter term.”
“Don’t want to go to Lunkhead.”
“Confederation College?
“What for?”
“I don’t know. To get a job.”
The band was playing “Stairway to Heaven” and a young guy came towards me looking like he was going to ask me to dance. I gave him my “fuck off” look and he backed right off. Nice to have power.
Anna changed the subject. “Hey, do you ever see Nakina?”
“No.”
“Too bad,” she said.
“No loss. Hey, lets get out of this place. It’s dead in here.”
We went back to the Wayland Hotel after and had a blast with all the ole guys buying us drinks. The band from the Legion was playing a Johnny Cash tune and Anna and I went up on stage, grabbed the mike and started singing. Don’t know if we were any good or if everyone was just so completely shit-faced that it sounded good, but man, the crowd loved us that night.
Anna went to the ladies room, or the “ladies and escorts” room as it’s known at the Wayland. She came out weaving and wobbling her way across the floor and I noticed something creeping below the hem of her skirt — her underwear was heading south. She couldn’t let go of her canes to grab them so before she knew it she was flying the flag at half-mast. I suppose I should have given her a hand but it was so damned funny. She started laughing so hard I thought she’d have a stroke. I eventually got up and helped her back to the ladies and escorts room but we were both so drunk I don’t know who was escorting who.
We closed down the Wayland that night and Toivo carried Anna home. Good times.
***
I was sitting in Anna’s room one night. We were listening to John Lennon. Loved John. When the Beatles split up I went with John. We were lying on our beds drinking a bottle of Old Sailor, smoking Cameos and listening to “Imagine.”
“I’m thinking of moving out,” I said.
“What?”
“I’m going to get a place of my own.”
“Why.”
“Don’t want to be a nuisance.”
“You’re not. You’re a pain in the ass, but not a nuisance.”
“Thanks.”
“Where would you go?”
“In the bush.”
“The bush. Seriously. You’re moving into the bush?”
“Maybe.”
“Why? You’ve been bitching for years about wanting to get out of this town, and now you’ve got the chance to get out and you’re going into the bush?
“Yeah.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Molly. Get out. Travel. Go to art college. You’ve got the money.”
Anna was right about the cash. I had this uncle who sold life insurance. Uncle Tommy used to come by the house about once a month with a bottle of rye and plunk himself down in the kitchen. He’d sit there getting shit-faced and the only way Dad could get rid of him was to buy insurance. So Dad bought life insurance. A lot of life insurance. Lucky me.
Anna was right about art school too. As long as I could remember I’d been planning my big escape from Fort McKay. I was going to go to art college — had it picked out. The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
What I couldn’t explain to Anna was that after the accident everything changed. I changed. I’d tried a few times to fill out the application form for NSCAD but I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go. I just didn’t think I was good enough. I figured that if I didn’t apply I couldn’t be rejected. Simple.
Next day I told Anna’s dad I was moving out and wanted to get a place as far back in the bush as I could get. Toivo took me to the Wayland and introduced me to a buddy from the mill who had a place for sale in Kamanistiquia.
Forbes Township, Kamanistiquia. Now that’s out there. Fifty miles out of town, off the highway, down a dirt road just wide enough to get a car down. The nearest house was more than five miles away.
I bought a car from an old lady across the street. Sixty-nine white Dodge Polara with red leatherette seats. Leatherette sounded so much classier than plastic. And it had a slant six engine. Don’t know why it mattered that the engine was on a slant, but it sounded hot.
I loaded it up with all my worldly belongings. I packed a garbage bag with my clothes and my grandmother’s old fur coat. I packed up all my canvases and easel and my acrylic paints and brushes. I packed some pots and pans that Kiiko gave me and three shoeboxes full of photos. I filled the trunk with canned food, a huge box of tea, a bushel of apples, a ten-pound bag of rice and three big plastic containers of drinking water. I didn’t know how safe the well water was. Bought an axe and a box of tools. I also packed the box of photocopies of the papers from the residential school. Toivo gave me a couple of bottles of wine and a case of beer. Kiiko was baking like crazy, and the last thing I loaded into the car was a large bag of homemade bread and my favourite sour cream coffee cake.
I knew Toivo and Kiiko weren’t happy about me moving out to the bush — no power, no phone, no one around for miles. But it suited me just fine. I wanted to be alone.
chapter thirteen
I moved out in the fall and worked like a bugger to get the place ready for winter. There were trees to cut, wood to split and food to store. Looked like there was about three cords of wood already cut, but I needed to cut another cord that would be seasoned and ready to burn by spring. I was glad dad taught me how to handle an axe. It was quiet. Blue jays woke me up in the morning with their shrieking, and sometimes I could hear squirrels snipping at each other, but most of the time it was completely silent.
The day after I got there I pushed an old wooden wheelbarrow out into the field and turned it to face the sun. It didn’t have sides, just a tipped up front so I could lie on it like a lounge chair. I stripped off my clothes — hey, who was going to see my skinny little body out there — and lay naked in the middle of the field. I could see the house at the front of the property and across the field the old barn. Farther out in the field I could see the sauna. Not another human for miles — just what I wanted.
I worked hard. Got water for washing from the well in the morning, stoked the woodstove, split wood, dried fruit. I peeled and cored the bushel of apples Kikko gave me, strung them through a rope and hung them above the woodstove to dry. I cut up old clothes I found in the place and chinked the holes in the logs. I chinked like mad because I knew the cold winter air would come through every bit of sunlight I could see through the logs.
The house had three rooms: kitchen, living room and bedroom. There was a narrow porch at the front. I nailed up planks of barn board for insulation in the living room and it looked good. I nailed hooks on the boards and hung some of my paintings. I set my easel up in the kitchen near the window and spread my paints on the faded oilcloth that covered the table.
At night, before I went to bed, I’d head out to the shitter. The outhouse was dark and full of bugs, and before long I figured it was easier to just go out in the field and squat under the stars. The sky was amazing — the Milky Way, the Little Dipper, Orion.
I walked the property. The deed said 186 acres, but I never walked it all. There was a logging road along one side that went up the hill and back about two miles. The woodlot was mostly spruce and pine with a bit of birch. My feet sank into a spongy blanket of needles as I walked. Farther back there were stands of black oak and aspen. Across the west field there was a path through the bush that led down to the Kamanistiquia River. The property line ran about a quarter mile along the river.
The house had been built by Kaapo and Lina Rintala. Finlanders. Socialists. Kaapo and Lina lived on the north side of the Kamanistiquia River with al
l the red Finns, and the more conservative white Finns lived on the south side. They built the house, did some farming, had some kids, and when the kids grew up they moved into town. That was in the 1930s. They never came back. Most didn’t.
As winter set in my body clock began to change. I slept in late. When I got up I went outside to pee, came back in, stoked the stove and made a pot of tea. In the afternoon after splitting wood I slept. At night, after going out to pee, I would bring the lantern into the kitchen, stoke the stove and paint. Not the best light, but I was awake and felt like working. I slept, stoked the fire, painted, slept. Sometimes I ate, but I wasn’t very hungry. Good thing. I didn’t have much food.
I was re-working the painting of the clock on the Empire Building. Corrected the perspective and angles of the windows. It was in black and white like all the rest, and I had painted the hands of the clock red so you could see it was 4:35 in the afternoon.
Once the snow came I really got off the time grid. No clock, no calendar. No time. Didn’t matter. No mirror either, which was good because I stopped washing when it got so cold that the water in the washbasin froze. I kept adding layers of clothes and didn’t take them off to sleep because the fire in the stove burned down by morning and it was friggin cold. I wore a fur hat with flaps — a true northern girl — and I looked like a freak. There was a thermometer mounted outside the kitchen window. It got down as far as forty-eight below. I think it froze there. I kept adding layers and layers of clothes, and on top I wore my grandmother’s beaver skin coat. The coat had been made by plucking out the long hairs of the beaver pelt and leaving the soft downy underfur. It really kept the cold out.
I knew I had to strip down eventually and wash, but that was hard to do in the bush in the winter. I’d be bursting to pee but put off going outside because it was too damn cold. I kept a piss pot inside and it froze, which was good because it didn’t stink. But every few days I had to go out and dump the peesicle.
My brain froze. Couldn’t hold a thought. Frozen brain on my skinny little stick body — brainsicle.
Funny things happen when you don’t talk. I thought I’d talk out loud to myself but I didn’t. I even stopped talking inside my head. Got into a weird zen place. I just was. Like the snow on the ground and the wolves in the hills and the logs in the walls. I just was. I sat in the kitchen in the cabin in the woods in the world. Didn’t seem like it needed to be more complicated than that.
Anna drove out in December and freaked me out. I panicked when I saw the car coming down the road and I hid. She got out and tried to walk through the snow with her canes and went face first into the snow. When she started swearing I realized who it was — no one can cuss in Finnish like Anna.
We sat down at the kitchen table, and she was talking so loud it felt like she was screaming at me. At first I just sat watching her — forgot that two-way thing with talking. I forgot I was supposed to jump in and do my bit.
“You look like Mary Christmas,” she said.
“Tis the season.”
“Seriously. You look like a street person. When was the last time you had a bath and washed your hair?”
“When did I move out here?” I said.
“Thought so. Are you eating?”
“I’m hibernating.”
“Mother’s worried about you. I’m worried about you. Come back into town with me. Stay at our place, just for the winter. You’ll freeze your ass off out here.”
I laughed. I thought about getting so cold that body parts started dropping off and before you know it, plunk, there goes my ass. “No thanks. I’m good.” I sat for a while, then realized it was my turn to say something. “How’s school?”
“Hard. They throw everything at you in the first term to weed out the losers.”
“How’d you do?”
“I passed.”
“Well good on ya Finlander, you’re not a loser.”
“Thanks. I think you’re getting bush wacky.”
“Yeah, maybe. Is that your car?” I asked, trying to change the subject.
“Yeah … like it?”
“It’s OK. Does it have hand controls?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it hard to learn how to use them?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I never learned any other way. Do you ever get freaked out here alone?”
“Just once. Heard a snowmobile up in the hills. Probably some redneck hunters.”
“What did you do?”
“Blew out the lantern, put my head between my legs and kissed my ass goodbye.”
“Ha. What about animals?”
“Mice and shrews. Lots of them. Excellent in stew.”
“Gross.”
“There’s wolves up in the hills.”
“Wolves?”
“Yeah. I see them at night when I go out to pee. They don’t bother me, I don’t bother them.”
Anna looked at the paint tubes and brushes on the table. “You’re painting.”
“A bit.”
She adjusted the metal grips of her canes around her forearms, got up and stood in front of the painting of the Empire clock on the easel. “Good stuff. Really.”
“I’ve got a lot to learn. Perspective is all shit.”
“So, learn. Go to art college.”
“Yeah, yeah. We’ve had this conversation.”
“Jeez, Molly, you can’t just stay out here wasting…”
“Don’t. OK?”
“You haven’t shovelled out the car. Is it running?” she asked.
“Probably not. Can’t plug it in out here. I haven’t tried to start it since the mercury went below forty.”
“Come back to town with me.”
“No.”
“You’re nuts.”
“I hate your face pretty much.”
Anna left me groceries and Finnish coffee bread from the Kivela bakery. My favorite bread — I think it had cardamom or something in it. I was grateful for the food but I was glad to see the taillights of her car disappear down the road. I didn’t want to see anyone. Not even Anna.
Couldn’t tell Anna the real reason I wouldn’t go back into town with her. Out here I didn’t know what day it was, so I didn’t know when it was Christmas Eve, so I didn’t have to face the anniversary of the accident.
I never talked about my mom and dad but they were always inside my head. I tried to hang on to their voices and their faces and the way it felt when my mom ran her hands through my hair when she was talking to me. It was getting harder.
***
I liked seeing the wolves at night. Maybe they liked taking a frog at me too. Why not — something new to look at. At first they stayed up at the edge of the clearing having a howl fest. Then they came a bit closer. One night they circled the barn and stood about five feet from me. Grey wolf, canis lupus. I counted eight of them. The male at the lead stood about three feet high with a thick grey coat — pale cream under his belly, then a darker fringe of greyish-black along his back. There were two V’s of black under his neck, and his slanted yellow eyes never left my face. I stood still and waited.
He moved slowly forward, bringing the other seven with him. I could see a smaller wolf at his side, and behind him two pups that had probably been born that summer. The others, as tall as the lead wolf, held back a bit. They crouched with heads lowered. Submission. A few steps closer and I could see the black line of his mouth, smirking.
A few feet closer now. About two feet away. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to feel the coarse fur at the side of his face. I wanted to run my hands over the short sharp ears. His legs were long and powerful. I tried not to breathe. He dipped his head, then looked at me again, and when he turned his head to the side the whole pack turned and walked back into the night. They stopped and turned one more time, frozen, staring at me, then trotted off into the bush.
A few minutes later I heard a howl — one long sad note. Silence, then the echo howled back across the valley. Silence again.
It was January or February, I don’t know. It kept getting bloody colder. The thermometer stayed at minus forty-eight so I knew it was stuck there. As I got colder, I got slower, and it got harder to get out from under the covers to stoke the stove or bring in wood. I got confused. I forgot to eat and sometimes when I woke up it was dark and I didn’t know if I was supposed to be waking up or going to sleep. My dreams felt real. Reality was fuzzy.
One night I dreamt I was walking home on Christmas Eve. I was walking along Simpson street when my parent’s car came around the corner. I looked up and saw my mom waving at me, and then in slow motion I watched a car come towards them, swerve and hit them head on. I woke up screaming.
After that I didn’t want to go back to sleep, so I slipped on my boots, grabbed the fur coat beside the bed and went into the kitchen. It was dark. I checked the woodstove and saw the fire was almost out. The embers were flickering red and yellow under the grey ash. I went to the wood box and took out the last two pieces. The fire caught but I needed more wood. I couldn’t let the fire go down like that again. I pulled back the latch of the storm door and stepped outside.
As I inhaled frost formed on the inside hairs of my nose. It hurt, so I opened my mouth to breathe and the cold cut my throat. I walked away from the house towards the woodpile and as I walked the sky got brighter.
I looked up at the stars and felt a crazy burst of happy. The moon was almost full and sent a streak of light across the north hill. A path. I wanted to walk to the top of the hill on that path of light. I had it in my head that I could just walk up to the stars, so I stepped off the hard-packed snow and onto the icy top surface. It held. I moved forward and heard a crack but I didn’t fall through. I was dancing on the snow, doing the northern girl rag. Rag momma rag, I was dancing my skinny little body up to the stars.
Shadows across the path. I stopped. He was back, with his yellow eyes on me. I could see the outlines of the others behind him. He smiled his dog-having-a-laugh smile. We stood still, together under the moon. I was one of the pack. I smelled their strong musky smell. I crouched down to be level with his eyes. I moved forward. I put my hands down so I was on all fours, almost touching his black nose. We were eye-to-eye and I could feel his hot sour breath. I waited for a sign. Waited for him to move forward.
Wake The Stone Man Page 9
