“How old were you when you went to beauty school?” I said when Mom mentioned it to one of her customers.
“Before you were born,” she said.
Dad helped her adapt the bathroom downstairs so that the sink was lower. They set up a swivel chair and put our old TV in front of it so the women could have something to watch while Mom put in their rollers. While the perms were setting, Mom and her customers would sip coffee and gossip. Their laughter and the smell of perm solution wafted through the house.
You can’t really hide things in the village. Everyone knew Dad had been going through some rough times since he quit working for the council and went on pogey. Mick’s death had hit him hard. Mom’s hair salon was helping to pay for Jimmy’s swimming lessons, but the swim meets were a strain. Most of the women who came to her knew this, and at first came more as a show of support than because they needed their hair done. I mean, when Aunt Edith asked for a perm, I knew the rumours of our pending financial doom must be flying through the village.
When my kitten heard doors open, her ears would perk up. She’d stir and stretch from her place on my pillow. Once she smelled the perm solution, she was out my door and downstairs, putting on her act.
I’ve always heard that cats eat only until they’re full and then they stop. But we fed my kitten the amount of food that was posted on the Tender Vittles packaging. She’d hork it down, then smack her lips and meow for more. She ate three times as much as kittens are supposed to, she ate anything, and she would keep eating until she vomited.
She would slowly make her way past Mom’s customers, pushing her bowl in front of her, mewling piteously. She’d rub herself frantically against the customers’ legs, then purr when Mom finally gave in and fed her. The only time it didn’t work was when Mom was doing five customers in a row for a wedding. She had done her act for the first four women and was mewling at the fifth when she let out this enormous belch, quickly followed by a fragrant fart. Mom threw rollers at her until she left the basement, but the damage had been done. It was so stinky that Mom had to finish the woman’s perm in the kitchen. My kitten slunk off into my room and sulked all night.
“You are definitely an Alexis,” I said, naming her after my favourite “Dynasty” character.
For my birthday, Ma-ma-oo opened a jar of ci’x°a. Wild crabapples grow in sandy places. There is a big grove in the Kitlope and the trees used to be pruned and healthy, Ma-ma-oo told me. But they are wild now, with tangled grey branches choking the green. Ci’x°a grow in bunches like cherries, but are smaller and sour. When ripe, they’re sweet but mushy. She liked them a little hard, for canning. Mick had done most of the picking. Ma-ma-oo picked for a while, but said she was too old to be climbing trees.
“I’ll do it this year,” I said.
“Good,” she said. She wasn’t hungry, but she poured a little in a bowl for me, and then sat down, practically falling asleep at the table.
“Are you okay?” I said, watching her blink slowly.
“Tired. Just tired.”
“From what?”
She waved an annoyed hand in my direction. “Na’.”
Ma-ma-oo looked pale. I brought her a glass of water. We went into the living room and she collapsed on her couch as if the effort of moving from the kitchen to the living room had been a climb up Mount Everest. I sat cross-legged beside her.
“Open her, I’m hot,” she said, and I realized she meant a window.
The sky was clear but the full moon hid the stars. Shimmering, mercury-coloured light shone off the large, lazy rolls of waves that crawled up the beach and flattened themselves against the rocks and logs before sliding back towards the ocean.
“Lisa.”
I hadn’t realized I was drifting off, and I became confused, thinking I’d heard Ma-ma-oo call my name. But it was only the soft, sibilant whisper of the waves rolling against the shore. Ma-ma-oo had slumped onto her side and had begun to snore.
The porch groaned under the weight of something that sounded like it was dragging itself across the wood. The TV flickered, and beneath “Dynasty”’s music, I could hear laughter and singing. I wondered if it was the truckers on their CBs that sometimes came through the TV’s radio. I sat down and snuggled in beside Ma-ma-oo. She muttered something, thrashed away from me. The strange sounds on the porch stopped.
The phone rang, making us both jump. Ma-ma-oo groggily reached over and grabbed the receiver, answering with her usual “What?” Ma-ma-oo nodded, then held the phone out for me.
“Lisa,” Dad said. “Are you noticing what time it is?”
I looked at the clock. “But—”
“Do you have homework? Is it done?”
“I didn’t get any homework today,” I lied.
“Oh really.”
“Well, not that much. I can do it in the morning.”
“Don’t make me come over there.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.”
I went over and kissed Ma-ma-oo’s cheek. “Bye.”
She patted my hand. “Wah,” she said, not looking away from the TV, where Alexis was trying to kiss Crystal’s husband.
As I was walking home, I saw a silhouetted figure coming towards me. All the kids knew Screwy Ruby. If you rolled quarters down the street, she’d run after them. If you poked her, she’d rear up and hiss like a cat. She walked around the village every night, her head swinging from side to side as she scanned the ground for change. I heard whispers that she was a witch. As she came nearer, she loomed over me, a creature out of Grimm’s fairy tales. Tilting her head like a crow, her eyes rolled, the edges of her brown irises pearl white with cataracts. Her long, white hair crinkled over her shoulders, controlled by a loose braid.
“Hi,” I said, standing tense, ready to run. I searched my pockets, pulled up three nickels and took a deep breath. I held them out. Ruby’s wrinkles rearranged themselves into a smile, and she showed two gold teeth as she took the change from my hand. Her fingers were dusty and warm.
I leaned close to her and whispered, “Are you really a witch?”
She kept smiling as if she hadn’t heard me.
Taking this to mean yes, I plunged in, afraid she’d stop me. “Do you ever see things? I saw this man, he was this high—” I held my hand up to my waist. “And his face was all wrinkly, and he comes into my room and I think it means I’ve got, you know, the gift, and I was wondering if you could teach me to be a witch, too.” I waited hopefully as she tucked the change in her sweater pocket.
Ruby bobbed her head, frowning at her feet. “You’re a bad girl.”
Indignant, I pulled back and spat, “Dad says you’re an evil witch and you eat people.”
Her smile came back. She chuckled, deep in her throat. “Pot calls me black.”
I turned sharply on my heel and marched home.
“Blackie!” she shouted after me. “Blackie!”
My kitten greeted me at the door when I came home. She mewled desperately, rubbed her head against my leg and drooped her tail. When I followed her to her bowl, Mom looked up from scrubbing a bloody stain on the kitchen floor.
“Believe me,” she said, her voice dry with suppressed annoyance, “she’s already eaten.”
I have never met a cat who loved hunting as much as Alexis. As a kitten, she made our house a mouse-free zone. She could bring down four to five a day. First, we’d hear her skittering across the linoleum. Sometimes this would last for hours. Eventually, we’d hear the terrified squeal of her prey. She’d carry it back to the living room, where, in front of the TV, she’d play with her victim until it flopped on the floor in exhaustion. Then, in delicate, tiny bites, she’d devour it, picking the bones clean. This did not endear her to Mom, who hated the bloodstains, the messy spectacle of Alexis eating and her habit of coughing up mouse fur anywhere she wanted.
“Wow,” Dad said on one of her busier nights. He watched in awe as she chomped her way through her sixth victim. He kept a chart on the wall, putting up a
skull and crossbones for every successful kill. “Good girl! Good girl, Alexis.”
She licked her gory mouth. She loved an audience and Dad was her most enthusiastic supporter. He said it was like watching the nature channel, only in 3-D.
“Think of the money we’re saving on mousetraps!” he said to Mom, who was looking slightly ill as Alexis ripped into the mouse’s belly.
“And on cat food,” I added.
Mom did not look consoled.
The mouse population in our house plummeted, so Alexis had to go outside to find prey. She never got over her need to show off her hunting skills, and no matter how far away she caught something, she had to bring it home. With her mouse in mouth, she would scratch at the door until Mom let her in.
One morning, Jimmy was eating Cheerios and reading an assignment. He’d grown used to Alexis bringing mice and rats into the house and didn’t look up when he heard her playing with something. Then he heard a desperate cheep and froze. When he looked up, Alexis was stalking a wounded sparrow, which frantically fluttered towards the kitchen table. It tried to hop onto a chair, but Alexis smacked it against the wall, smearing blood and guts as she dragged it all the way to the floor. She prodded it, and when it didn’t move, picked it up and laid it at his feet.
After that, Jimmy insisted she be brought in every night. He’d seen her sitting on the windowsill, tail twitching in anticipation as she watched him feed the crows. I pointed out that crows were bigger than Alexis, and were also quicker and a lot smarter than sparrows. Jimmy set his mouth. Mom was on his side. Dad reluctantly agreed.
So every morning when she heard the crows gathering on our porch, she’d hop off my chest, mewl pathetically as she ran back and forth, and bump her head against my bedroom door. After five or ten minutes of this, she’d hop on the windowsill and stare at Jimmy’s crows with such longing that sometimes I was tempted to let her out.
Pull your heart out of your chest. Cut away the tubes that sprout from the top. Place your heart on a table. Take a knife and divide it in half, lengthwise. Your heart is hollow. Each side has two chambers. The top chambers receive blood and the bottom chambers pump it out. This requires great strength, so the bottom chambers are larger and more muscular than the top chambers. The right side takes oxygen-poor blood from your body and pumps it into your lungs. The left side takes oxygen-rich blood from your lungs and pumps it back into the body. The pulse you feel at your wrists and neck is actually the shock wave emanating from the epicentre of your beating heart and vibrating through your arteries.
Look closer. Notice that each of the four chambers has a valve, a flap that controls the direction of the pumping blood. Put your heart back in your chest. Plug your ears with your fingers and listen carefully. You should be able to hear a rhythmic lub, dub, lub, dub. The sound you are hearing is not the heart muscle itself, but the four valves in your heart closing. At the beginning of systole, your heart goes lub. This is the sound of the two valves that let blood into the lower part of your heart slamming shut. At the end of systole, your heart goes dub. The two valves that let blood out of your heart have shut. If your valves don’t close properly, your heart murmurs.
I steer through the oncoming rain, but this squall is mild, and the waves bumping my speedboat are smaller than what I went through about fifteen minutes ago. I’m passing Costi Island on my right. The Kildala arm is to my left. When Ma-ma-oo and I hiked around here, she showed me where the winter and summer camps used to be, where people picked berries or had traplines. Because of all the clear cutting, bears from the Kildala area have migrated closer to Kitamaat for food, and they’re territorial about their blueberry bushes. One black bear made her den near the road, and in the spring the cubs played there. Tourists would usually stop and get out of their cars to get closeup shots of the cubs.
“Never go near cubs,” Ma-ma-oo used to say. “That’s a good way to get dead.”
Bears thrive in this area. The entire coast of British Columbia is made of drowned mountains. The water beneath my boat was once dry land. But as the last Ice Age ended, the water rose, covering the shortest of the young, jagged mountains until they appeared as they are today: islands and mainland joined by a complex system of twisting inlets, canals, passages, rivers, streams, waterfalls and lakes.
Early explorers traveling through the Douglas Channel were probably daunted by both the terrain and the new languages they encountered. Haisla has many sounds that don’t exist in English, so it is not possible to spell the words using English conventions. The language of the people in Kitamaat Village is commonly called Haisla. The actual word for the Haisla language is Xa’islak’ala, to talk in the manner of Xa’isla. To say Xa’isla, touch your throat. Say the German “ach” or Scottish “loch.” When you say the first part, the “Xa,” say it from far back in your throat. The apostrophe between the syllables signals both an emphasis and a pause. Say “uh-uh,” the way you’d say it if you were telling a child not to touch a stove. Put that same pause between the first and last syllables of Xa’isla. Haisla is difficult for English speakers to learn partly because most English sounds are formed using the front of the mouth, while Haisla uses mainly the back.
In much the same way that Spanish is similar to French, Haisla is similar to the languages spoken by the people in Bella Bella and the people in River’s Inlet. If you know one language, the other is fairly easy to pick up because the grammar and sounds and vocabulary are comparable. Haisla, however, is as different from English as English is from Arabic or Irish.
The name Haisla first appeared in print in 1848 as Hyshallain. It has alternately been spelled Haishilla in 1884, Qaila in 1890 and Ha-isla in the early 1900s. Xa’isla is actually a word for the village or the people of the village who lived at the mouth of the Kitimat River. Originally, there were also two other Haisla groups; the Nalibila, those living upriver; and the Gilda’lidox, those living in the Kildala Arm, which is a few minutes ahead of me. Some time before the first white settlement, the three branches began to winter together at the village of the Xa’isla.
We stayed in this village at the bottom of the Kitimat River until about 1893, when the Methodist missionary George Raley established a rival village on an old settlement site in present-day Kitamaat Village. Converts moved there when they became Christianized. By the early 1900s, most of the Haisla had moved to Kitamaat Mission, as the village was called.
Ma-ma-oo told me that my mother’s grandmother would not move to the mission. She lived in the different summer and winter camps until she died. When I tried to ask Mom why her grandmother didn’t move, Mom told me not to listen to any of Ma-ma-oo’s stories.
Despite, or because of, Mom’s disapproval, I would sit with her on the couch and flip through her box of unsorted photos. I liked the ancient, crispy yellow pictures of Mimayus in her sweetheart necklines and Rita Hayworth hairdos and with her easygoing smile that reminded me of Mick’s. I found a photo of Mom standing between Mick and Dad, who were both wearing basketball uniforms. Mom was perfectly groomed, of course, and looking very ladylike. I said I must have been adopted. Ma-ma-oo laughed and said that when Mom was a little girl, she was always doing things like tying two cookie sheets to her shoes and attempting to ski because she’d seen one of her movie star idols in a magazine, elegantly poised on the slopes of Switzerland. Mom flew down the hill, hit a bump and crashed into a bush. She broke her leg and earned the nickname “Crash.”
“Did Dad have a nickname?” I asked.
Ma-ma-oo frowned thoughtfully. “Some people, they called him Mick’s Shadow because he does everything Mick does. But,” she grimaced, “I never did like that name. Albert, he loved the heels of bread. I baked twelve loaves one day. They were on the table to cool. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, all the loaves had no ends! He cut them off and hid down the beach and ate them.”
He was hard to get mad at, she explained, because he would do things like ruin her favourite pinking shears cutting wildflowers and branch
es to fill the living room because it was her birthday and he wanted her to wake up to something special.
“Do you know what we called Mick? ‘Monster.’ Oh, he was a terror. He’d jump out at you from closets, grab your feet from under the bed or sneak up behind you and tickle you. He loved to scare people, especially his sisters. Poor Albert was either being scared by Mick, or Trudy and Kate were putting makeup on him or practising new hairstyles. He had lovely hair.”
“Why is Aunt Trudy mad at you now?” I said.
Her smile became sad. “We had a fight a long time ago. Very angry fight.”
“About what?”
She touched my hair. “Old-people things. You’ll learn about them, but not now.”
“How come?”
“Look!” she said, pointing to the TV. “I think they’re going to fight!”
I knew she was changing the subject, but decided to let it go.
Alexis and Crystal circled each other. We stopped and waited, but they just poked fun at each other and Alexis left, reappearing after the commercial in a sparkling white dress, trying to seduce some woman’s husband at a cocktail party.
“Na’,” Ma-ma-oo said. “He’ll never make you happy.”
“Ma-ma-oo, it’s just TV.”
“Yes, yes. I know,” she said, absorbed in Alexis’s unsubtle flirting.
There were only two channels, but there were rumours that we were going to get a satellite dish in the village. Dad said it wasn’t likely, because it was so expensive. Ma-ma-oo’s TV was on its last legs—everyone looked green and the top of the picture leaned to the left, so Alexis’s and Crystal’s big hair looked very windblown. Meanwhile, Ma-ma-oo liked it when they got into mud fights. Now Alexis waltzed with a man she was trying to seduce. The man played it cool, but when he thought she wasn’t looking, he’d give her big cow eyes.
Monkey Beach Page 16
