by Connie Cook
She tried to think about her father sometimes, but she couldn't find much to think about him. She could remember the swallows, but there wasn't much to think about in that.
Chapter 2
In the southeastern corner of British Columbia, tucked between the Selkirk range on the west and the rugged Purcells on the east, lies Kissanka Lake, a bright jewel in a rough setting of mountains and evergreen forest.
Just south of Kissanka Lake is an unpretentious uprising of earth that goes by the pretentious name of Arrow Mountain (more of a large hill, really), and here the Arrow River (more of a large creek, really) begins. At the foot of Arrow Mountain and the head of the Arrow River lies our small town, Arrowhead, named by some punning settler. Arrowhead (population unknown by me at this moment, but somewhere under five thousand, I guess) has grown some since the days of this story, but in essentials, it remains very much the same town that Ruth saw that day through the window of the greyhound bus.
* * *
The sun was just setting as, from the steep mountain pass, the bus swooped down upon the Arrowhead Valley like an eagle dropping from its eyrie. Ruth's eyes, after their seven-year fast, hungrily took in their fill of the little town.
It was late April – nearly unarguably the most beautiful time of year in Arrowhead. The apple and cherry orchards were aglow with their earthly glory of seasonal white and with a heavenly glory of rosy, evening light, reflecting from the sky.
The bus took a turn from the open farm land of the valley and passed A.A. Turnbull Enterprises sawmill. It wasn't a sight Ruth would normally have relished, but everything was beautiful to her just then.
MacKellum Milling – the rival sawmill, a newer facility and a more attractive one in Ruth's opinion – inhabited the other side of town. Guy MacKellum had started the mill himself as an enterprising young man who grew tired of working for Old Man Turnbull.
Old Man Turnbull's son, Angus, ran Turnbulls' after the Old Man died. Angus was Lily's father, and Guy was Graham's father. These facts may have played a role in Ruth's preference for the MacKellum sawmill.
The MacKellums were considered a good family, but not quite so good as the Turnbulls. Not old money. Just nice people, really. Nice, hard-working, down-to-earth people. Everyone liked the MacKellums. Everyone had liked Guy's father when he'd been alive. Everyone continued to like Guy and his wife. She was a good-natured woman. A bit tight with her money – that was the worst that could be said about her. And she managed to carry that fault in a likeable, laughable kind of way. It was a sort of family joke.
And Graham was nice, too. He moved in Lily Turnbull's circles, but he wasn't like her.
He was ordinary. You'd never have called Graham a handsome face. Or a brilliant mind. But we all thought he was a nice boy.
I know Ruth thought so. I was the only person who knew it, but I knew it.
He'd changed as he grew older, though. When he grew into his teenage self, he seemed intent on proving something. To whom, I could never decide.
But Ruth wasn't there to see the changes that took place in all of us. By the time she came back, she was practically a stranger to most of us, and everyone she'd known was a stranger to her.
* * *
After Ruth came back, she and Graham met for the first time again at the dance at Marjorie Trapwell's wedding.
It was a huge event. Nearly the whole town turned out for the dance, even those who hadn't been invited.
Ruth didn't want to go. She didn't know Marjorie at all well, but Wynnie Starke wouldn't take no for an answer. Wynn didn't have a date, and she refused to go solo.
Ruth and Wynnie (who now insisted on being called Wynn) were standing together near the bowl of punch. Wynn feigned thirst every dance she wasn't asked to dance rather than looking on from the row of chairs along the wall. Ruth didn't care about being a wallflower, but she was there to keep Wynn company, however strange they had become to each other. So Ruth and Wynn spent a lot of time by the punch bowl at that dance. Wynn didn't dance much because, as usual, there were more girls than boys, and the boys found other things to do out behind the hall where an atmosphere of cigarette smoke and boisterous maleness drifted in through the open back door.
Ruth hadn't been asked to dance at all, so she watched Wynn drink more punch than she really wanted and eyed the dancers half-wistfully. Her feet tapped and her fingers kept time on the skirt of her new-but-cheap-and-deeply-discounted, full-skirted taffeta.
How desperate she'd felt for something to wear besides her old, much-worn blue jeans and second-hand cotton dresses! How much she'd wanted something at least a little bit pretty! She'd bought the dress for herself from her first-ever pay cheque. She'd live on nothing but potatoes for a week, but it was worth it.
Her first-ever pay cheque came to her courtesy of Jim and Morning Glory Metzke of the Morning Glory Cafe.
* * *
They were Americans – a Texan couple. And Glo (no one had ever called her Morning Glory) lived up to every inch of what the townspeople expected of a Texan. As flamboyant as her name with hair a fiery shade of orange, heavy, blue eyeshadow, and skin that suspiciously changed colour at the jawline, Glo's drawl increased perceptibly every year she lived in Arrowhead. She was as large and loud as Jim was small and spare and silent. Glo never worried about remembering names. Everyone was either a "hon" or a "darlin'." Except Ruth who quickly became "Ruthie" or "Ruthie Darlin'."
Glo liked Ruth's looks right off (and she was never wrong about her first impressions she was quick to inform people). They had an opening, so Glo hired her on the spot, even with no experience.
"You'll learn fast," she told Ruth confidently. "I can just tell. My first impressions are never wrong. Now, Darlin', here's a uniform for ya. Come in tomorrow mornin' for training. We open at six, but be here by five thirty so I can show you the mornin' routine."
And just like that, Ruth had her first job.
She did learn fast. She was a quick worker and had a good memory which made her a natural for waitressing. She could have made more of an effort at friendliness, but Ruth wasn't one to chit-chat. Even for pay.
The regulars who ate at the Morning Glory appreciated getting their orders hot and soon and without reminding their waitress about their little idiosyncrasies – like, that Ray Schultz wouldn't eat onions and that Mrs. Schultz always wanted extra crackers for her soup – more than they would have appreciated chit-chat from their waitress. So Ruth did very well as a waitress, and her tips showed it.
Jim offered to train her in the kitchen. It would have been a higher wage for Ruth, but she would have lost her tips, so she stayed waitressing, and Eva Dempstra, the new girl, was moved from waitressing to cooking. Jim couldn't handle it all himself, and Glo wasn't the cooking type. She ran the front end. She provided all the chit-chat any customer could ask for.
The Morning Glory soon became Ruth's other home. She spent most of her spare time there when she wasn't working. Most of her meals were eaten perched on a tall stool at the counter, sampling one of Jim's latest culinary inventions and listening to Glo tell stories on the customers. Glo's sense of humour was as expansive and overabundant as everything else about her.
Jim and Glo were the closest things Ruth had to family, and she couldn't help being curious about them. One time, Glo showed her their wedding photo. Jim was instantly recognizable. Except for the loss of a little hair, he hadn't changed much. He still wore the same quiet, serious expression. He looked younger, a little taller, a little less spare, in his wedding photo, but the Jim of the old photo was the Jim of the present.
On the other hand, Ruth never would have guessed the young, slim, glamourous woman in the wedding photo to be the Glo Ruth knew if Glo hadn't prefaced the exhibition of the photo by asking, "Would you like to see Jim and me's wedding picture?" (As Glo told Ruth, she'd changed some since the photo was taken.)
The couple in the picture made a handsome couple (in an outmoded kind of way. The old clothes looked comical to Rut
h's modern eyes). Ruth tried to recapture in her imagination the romance of the young James and Morning Glory Metzke, wildly in love. It was easily done from looking at the old photo, but when Ruth looked at the present-day realities, her imagination balked.
But Jim and Glo were happy together. Ruth hoped for as much herself some day. Wild romance was all right in its place, but it did no one any good unless it made way for or turned into the quieter, calmer assurance of lifelong togetherness that Jim and Glo shared.
The couple had three, grown children, all still back in Texas. It was a whim of Glo's that brought the couple to Arrowhead in their retirement years. Jim, an accountant, had always had a dream to run a cafe, and Glo had always had a dream to live in the Canadian wilderness. They picked Arrowhead off of a map, probably because the name had a Canadian-wilderness kind of a sound to it and because of the lake and the mountains.
Although they were both happy in Arrowhead, they would probably go back to Texas when they retired for the second time. Glo complained endlessly about seeing only once a year the grandbabies who were already getting too big to sit on their grandma's lap. It was no wonder Glo took Ruth under her ample wing. Ruth needed family, and so did Glo and Jim. It was a good arrangement.
* * *
The music was old-fashioned – just old-timey fiddling, a banjo, and a piano – but even the younger crowd couldn't keep their feet from moving although they disdained the music with their mouths. In her mind, Ruth practised the steps the others were doing. Would her feet ever be able to do that? If anyone asked her to dance (but no one would), what would she say?
A middle-aged man she didn't know approached, looking directly at her, and Ruth felt her spine tense. But he moved to the punch bowl and helped himself to a glass. Ruth let her spine relax, but it was a disappointed relaxing. The middle-aged stranger might have been able to teach her the steps without shaming her like someone she knew or someone her own age might.
Graham MacKellum came for a glass of punch.
"Hey, Wynnie," he said.
"Wynn!" she corrected, forming her mouth into the tiny pout she'd practised in front of her mirror.
"Are you serving the punch, Wynn?" he asked, extra emphasis on her name, drawing out the "nn."
"Only for you," Wynn flirted.
"Hello, Ruth," he said to Ruth (obviously!)
"Hello, Graham," she said back. And then she said nothing else. If there were anything else to say, she would have said it. But there just wasn't.
"Are you sticking to the punch bowl all night, or are you dancing?" he asked Wynn.
"Depends who's asking?" Wynn said coyly.
"I might. If you're nice to me. Maybe if you're both nice to me, I might give you both a whirl," Graham said leering at Ruth and Wynn.
There was no other word for it. Graham had leered at them.
"We should be so lucky!" Wynn said, rolling her eyes.
"Does that really work?" Ruth asked him. Her face had gone unimpressed.
Amazing how fast some things could happen! Funny how seven years of deluded rememberings could disintegrate like ice before a flame from the heat of one careless sentence. She realized then that Graham had changed. Or perhaps that she had. Or perhaps that she'd never known him at all. Or perhaps all three.
"Does what work?" Graham asked, startled, really noticing Ruth for the first time that evening. Maybe the first time ever.
"Do lines like that really work on some girls?"
Now Graham was annoyed and didn't bother to hide it.
"Just ask 'em," he said nastily.
"Just so you know, it doesn't work on everyone," Ruth said and turned on her heel to walk away.
"Is that so?" Graham said, moving in front of her to cut off her exit. The dance with Wynn was forgotten. His dander was well and truly up.
"That's so."
"I bet I could get any girl in this room to dance with me."
"Maybe you could. But there's more girls in the world than are in this room. All of us are not alike, Graham. Some of us are ... oh, never mind! I don't know what some of us are! Some of us don't appreciate the kind of cheap talk you seem to specialize in."
Graham exhaled long and loud.
"Wheeew! What's put a knot in your tail? First time I see you in years, and you don't have one civil word for me? Fly right in with a lecture, why doncha?"
Ruth instantly felt stupid and miserable.
"I'm sorry! I really am! I don't know what gets into me," she said.
"You've changed!" Graham said. "You used to be kinda mousy and quiet." He didn't sound entirely pleased but maybe a little amused by the changes.
"I know I've changed. Somewhere along the way I started to say whatever comes into my head without worrying what anybody thinks about it. I didn't used to be like that, I know. I can see you've changed, too, though."
"Course I have. What d'you think? That nothing or nobody in Arrowhead would change while you were away? I mean, it's been what? Six years? Seven years? We were about twelve when you left, right? Some things have changed in seven years. Not much, but some. Not much changes around here, except people. People always keep changing."
"I know." Ruth had nothing more to say, so she said nothing.
There was an awkward moment of silence. Somehow, with Ruth trying to escape and Graham in front of her blocking her path, they'd moved away from the punch bowl and were facing each other, a little too closely for comfort. Ruth's back was against the wall, and Graham was leaning forward to catch her words over the music with one hand against the wall for balance. They looked at each other and recognized the barest hint of fear in the eyes of the other. It occurred to both that they would look, to any casual observer, as though they were involved in an intimate conversation. Graham broke the silence first.
"So if I asked you to take me up on my bet and prove me wrong, what would you say?"
"What?" Ruth said.
"In plain English, woman, do you want to dance?"
"Oh!"
Whatever Ruth had expected from Marjorie Trapwell's wedding, it hadn't been that she would be having a strange and apparently intimate conversation with Graham MacKellum. Or more surprising still, that he would ask her to dance.
"I don't know how to dance," she said. Again, there was nothing else to be said.
"Wha'd'y'mean you don't know how? Anyone can dance."
"I've never learned," she said.
"It's easy. I'll teach you. That is, if you're not trying to win that bet. I don't think we shook on it, though, so you might as well dance with me," he grinned at her.
It was a good thing for Ruth that she hadn't taken Graham up on his wager. When he shot his boyish smile at her, reminding her of the old Graham who teased all the girls in the class good-naturedly, casually as though by birthright, what else could she do? Besides, she was dying to learn. The music got into her somehow and took over. She was helpless under its influence. At least, she believed it to be the music's influence.
And then she found herself dancing with Graham. Not one dance. Not two dances. Not even three. It took her four dances to feel mildly confident that she'd learned what Graham was teaching.
Graham turned out to be a patient teacher. He didn't obviously mind spending all his valuable time (and depriving every other girl in the room of his company!) teaching her. He almost seemed to enjoy it. He gave her that heart-jumping grin from time to time as she started to catch on, and between Graham's smile and the relentless music, there was no stopping Ruth.
Until after the fourth dance when Graham said, "Let's sit the next one out. You're wearing me out. I can't keep up to you anymore."
Ruth sat, and Graham asked, "Would you like a glass of punch?"
"Yes please," Ruth gasped. She could feel the sweat on her forehead and a trickle on her nose. She wiped her face quickly on her handkerchief while Graham went for punch. She'd never dreamed before how much fun a dance could be.
Chapter 3
I hope you can tell
from what I've told you about her so far that Ruth had a kind heart. However, I don't mean to leave you with the impression that she had no faults. She had her faults, all right. She was was stubborn and outspoken – honest to the point of rudeness. And she had a quick temper. She often said things she regretted later.
When she and Wynnie and Lily were all about eleven, there were often times when Wynnie deserted Ruth and played with Lily instead.
Lily did things like that occasionally. She'd allow Wynnie to feel like she was getting somewhere only to dash her hopes after a week or so by some piece of well-planned cruelty. But it was hard to feel too sorry for Wynnie. Her cruelties might not have been as premeditated as Lily's, but they were cruelties nonetheless.
On one particular morning before the bell rang for classes, while everyone waited on the playground until the last minute, Lily and Wynnie were in the corner by the swing set, whispering to each other. Ruth pretended to take no notice. She'd gone to meet Wynnie as usual, but Wynnie hadn't acknowledged Ruth's presence, rather turning to whisper to Lily. Ruth had nothing else to do and no one else to play with, so she did nothing and played with no one. She stood leaning against one of the poles of the swing set, looking at her shoes, enormously aware that whatever Lily and Wynnie were whispering was all about her. She knew the smartest thing to do would be to leave the whispering pair and go be alone somewhere, but fatalism kept her where she was. She had to know the worst. Whatever was going to happen, it might as well happen and get it over with.
"Her mother's not even her real mother. You can tell by looking at her. Her real mother was an Indian. My mom said so." Wynnie's voice was exaggeratedly loud. It was a comment Ruth was meant to hear.
"You can tell she's a half-breed. Only a half-breed would be that dirty." Lily looked directly at Ruth as she said it.
This was revelation to Ruth. It had never occurred to her before. She knew the truth of it as soon as Wynnie said that her mother wasn't her mother. It explained the thing that Ruth had always wondered: why didn't she look like Mother? Other kids looked like their parents.
