A bird on every tree

by Carol Bruneau

  “Your face would stop a clock,” you said once. That was the extent of the compliments you paid me, referring to the first time we met. It was at a folk festival; I was driving through the field in my friend’s car. She and I were smoking weed and suddenly found ourselves in the ditch, a parade of feet streaming past the windows, which at the time seemed cosmically funny. You were the first thing I saw when I jumped out—you and your bus. You were lighting a joint in the driver’s seat, this ancient blue school bus parked there with Beautiful B. C. plates as exotic as you. Your black coffee eyes, your waist-length ponytail and cheekbones that looked Central American said you weren’t from around here—no way. But I had seen the bus before—who wouldn’t have noticed it parked down the hill from my parents’ street? I’d taken to walking by just to see it, a sort of landmark amidst the bungalows, the sign of someone’s hippie relative returned from the west? The wild west of communes and non-aboriginals living in teepees. The west that in stories I soon would hear featured these and handwritten vegetarian cookbooks, bulk grains, lost love, and serious addictions—some vague, restless grief on your part, I see now.

  Without a second thought I hopped aboard. You had a Maharishi smile, a Colonel Saunders southern gentlemanliness about you, the way you held out the roach: “Toke?” My friend had gone off to party with whoever had helped free her car. Still giddy from watching all those feet, I was alone with you—the bus had just the one seat and I stayed standing. Inhaling felt ordinary, boring even—predictable to share the butt end of a joint when we might’ve shared conversation or our names, for starters (the thought of which makes me laugh a little now). Then some partiers crowded on and I went to find my friend. The whole thing lasted maybe three minutes.

  I honestly can’t remember how or where we met again, only that when we’re very young stuff happens fast. Soon there was sex. You were never possessive, urging me to have it with other people too though I was—I am—stubbornly monogamous. There’s not much to say, except that the romance included flannel sheets in need of washing and lentils that stayed bullet-hard despite boiling for hours on a hotplate.

  There was the sea’s lapping, yes, and the flap of wings: gulls’ wings and crows’.

  You smelled of sawdust and clean sweat. Your broad-shouldered, deeply tanned body was compact and wiry. You had a perfect six-pack and were an eyeful working shirtless when I’d sneak downstairs from playing house above—which I did for a time that summer—to the squealing buzz of power tools. Early on I may have expressed some interest in using them, not entirely a ploy. You showed me how. I appreciated the band saw’s swift, neat cut but balked, always, at the table saw’s teeth. Table saws still make my head swim with images of women in boxes being sawn in two, magician-style.

  The chests you crafted to sell to tourists were twee pirate ones with rope handles and curved lids—small trunks for dreamy sea voyages. The scent of their sanded pine dispelled staleness. Because there was staleness, the kind after much drinking: red-labelled Olands and cheap Hungarian wine—sex on Saturday was how we said its name—and, in your case, rum and Coke; I remember your fondness for rum and Coke. Also there was weed, hash, and coke scored from boats hovering just offshore and snorted from a jagged scrap of mirror.

  Yours was a world as dangerous, remote, and as alluring as British Columbia seemed back then. You were a migratory bird choosing between up- and downdrafts, the riskier the better—if choice figures, figured, into anything.

  A studious girl with a sometimes interest in cell division, with you I easily play-acted at being what I wasn’t, charmed—then—by those who flew without safety nets, without much in the way of wings, even: people unconcerned with survival. It was fun to flirt with what the safety of my grounding frowned on, having, for instance, a mom just edgy enough to buy health food, and the fact that your mom lived near mine.

  “He’s yours now, you take care of him,” yours said once—imagine! You might have been from some previous generation: why would I want to catch up with it? But you had that allure, and it wasn’t as if you were mean, or unkind. “Patient” would describe your judgmental hippie non-judgment, call it pacifism or apathy, a zen detachment or simple disinterest; if not for racing hormones, you were a brotherly older companion. I followed you places my friends wouldn’t have.

  I revisit this now, recalling it. The way some people note the taste of a certain coffee, you described doing heroin: the rush, nothing like it. Any tracks on your arms had healed over, veins roping over carpenter’s muscles—you had those powerful arms. Not once did you utter the L-word, your honesty pressed to the limits by my presence—your forbearance. You’d done too many acid trips to lie like that, you said; had fallen too hard and too deeply for someone once, then crashed, left to burn by a woman who’d driven your bus.

  Traces of her popped up: yellowed notes, a stray glass bead here, a wooden one there, and in the excess width of the Guatemalan hammock you strung between two studs. A curled snapshot—too faded to reveal more than her smile and Janis Joplin hair—showed the two of you partying behind the wheel.

  Did I ever imagine or expect that I would see you again, that it would be in a shelter for the homeless?

  Without a trace of bitterness I remember a wilted sprig of wild laurel on the floorboard by your bed—blooms like tiny pink umbrellas—left by someone, someone else, not you, not me. Apart from your endless supply of lentils you had no interest in flora, other than in trees for timber; boards that with nails and screws could be fashioned into something to breach waves, brave the seven seas. I remember the buckets of salt water and the fires you built under them, steaming planks into bowed shapes: pipe dreams of sailing the oceans in a homemade ship.

  My first and only clue something had tilted, had changed, was that dried twig, its spiralling leaves and flowers. The commonest of plants in the woods of my childhood, so ordinary as to go unremarked—who would be so dull, so limited in their choices as to pick it? The same pink, those miniscule blossoms were, as my dress, which I’d sewn myself. Ragged inner seams, gathered waist, long skirt: a polygamist’s idea of sexy, my husband would joke if he knew, picturing women in modest cotton with long, straight hair—their appearance screaming of some sociopathic male greed.

  The romance outlasted summer but barely, in the end simply petering out. One day I caught the Acadian Lines bus back home. But I remember the last time I saw you, a few months later. You were in the city on an errand, the city where I’d gone back to school. I had a backpack loaded down with cellular biology texts. You were driving through this busy intersection in your truck—the school bus by now turned into scrap—and we spotted each other at what felt like the very same moment. You pulled over and, before I could run away, got out. The sky was grey, I remember; it was raining or, possibly, snowing; the first, wet snowfall of the year. A city bus stopped, releasing its passengers. Among them was a sandy-haired guy I recognized vaguely from third-year ecology class.

  You had nothing to say, except to explain that you’d decided to stop seeing me. (When my friend with the car heard about this, she laughed, “I can’t believe it.”) You mentioned, offhand, somebody’s name. I remember part of me wanting to curse you up and down and even take a swing with my backpack. But it was way too heavy and cumbersome and, anyway, you didn’t give me the chance, jumping back into your truck and peeling off.

  The guy from ecology must’ve seen me struggling, because he offered to help with my backpack. “Here,” he said, and shouldered it all the way to class. This was the first time we’d actually spoken, and we ended up having coffee afterwards. “What were you so mad about?” he wondered and maybe, years later, he still does.

  It’s not something I’ve gone into, not even when he teases about how “shipwrecked” I looked that day—crushed, bereft, furious—that first time he really noticed me. Quite a first impression, I must say, to leave on a future husband: the sweet man, retired now, who eventually became
mine.

  You and I never spoke again; but once, your mother phoned.

  “I don’t expect to see him ever again,” I said in a voice frigid enough to snap the line.

  The following Wednesday I report as always to the Beacon, in time for coffee duty. There’s an abundance, an embarrassment, of cookies past their best-before date, a truckload gone stale after sitting for days on some whited-out stretch of highway between here and New Brunswick. Coconut and chocolate chip—your favourites. For all the millet you stockpiled, you had a wicked sweet tooth, I do recall.

  But when the coffee’s fixed and the snack set out on plastic trays, when the men line up you’re not among them. I scan the room—let my eyes linger by the TV, where I’d expected, hoped, to see you. You see, I planned how I would approach you; I’d decided it was better to own up, to speak as if we might have something to say. In meeting your direct, knowing eye, I aimed to see the past melt and slip by—a chunk of shore ice loosed from rocky moorings, set adrift to dissolve and disappear.

  I was mostly just curious to see if you remembered me.

  But as coffee time begins and ends there’s no sign of you, only the others I’ve come to know by sight if not by name—the ones who, week in and week out, rely on this place. Then Marnie comes up, helping herself to a cookie, and says, “Missing someone?”

  I can only shake my head and smile at the nurse coming in early, hauling a box full of gauze and antiseptic. And I hear her say, “That was too bad, the other night—that guy they found by the bus stop? Got him to hospital anyways—at least he passed in a comfy bed.”

  From under hoodies, faces glance up. “Peter?” Marnie nods, then shakes her head. “Sad, for sure. Yeah. Oh well.”

  A life lost is never less than that—nor is the severing of a tie great or small, even when it’s an infatuation left unfed, with nothing to fuel the work that love demands.

  The end of the life in question lent my own a circularity, I guess. Putting on my coat at the end of shift I felt older, definitely more winter-weary than when I’d first learned the art of brewing coffee in two-hundred-cup batches, but liberated somehow, too. Liberated from the shadow side of life’s open-endedness, the skittish urge to flirt with exactly the nothingness that cuts us, all of us, adrift.

  The sun shines and the snow falls on everybody indiscriminately, I liked to believe—whether we squirm towards or away from either, seeking comfort: love, you could call it. The kind that asks nothing in return might seem the safest—but might also be the most dangerous, knowing, as it does, no limits.

  As I dug for my keys, men dozed before the TV. Through a Plexiglas blur, ice pellets showered the pavement outside and dulled the harbour’s desolate blue. Someone handed me an empty coffee cup, muttered thanks with no hope of getting a refill.

  “Sarah. Can we count on you again next time?” Marnie called from behind the desk’s bulletproof glass, and without much hesitation, “Of course,” I said.

  “What’s up?” my husband asks. “What’s wrong?”

  “With—? Should there be?” Before I can hang up my coat and slough off my boots he’s standing close, inspecting me as if something has happened, not to someone else but to me.

  “Have a hug, Sarah. You can’t get enough of that place, can you.”

  I put my hand to his warm, wrinkled cheek, the sandy beard now white. “I’m fine. Really. It’s all good.” Which it is, which it must be, in the diminished way of marching age which knows the shelf-life infatuations have, even before they begin. Safe, always safe, they do not ask more than any one of us wants or is able to give.

  the Vagabond Lover

  The bedside clutter would easily crowd out any book—Styrofoam cups, straws in paper sleeves, tiny boxes of hospital Kleenex jockeying for space, these and the disconnected phone taking more room than it deserves. It’s not like she’ll be calling anyone, with the crispness of outdoors creeping in, creeping through—Dolly can feel it penetrating the window that faces the sea. The ferry cutting a path through sea smoke on its way to Newfoundland: this she pictures. Hardly needs to see to do so, or to feel the hard frost pulling the last leaves from the maples. The world in solemn stillness lay. A kind of carol rings in both ears, ears not much good for hearing anymore but with a new acuity, one all their own.

  Her chest lifts and falls. The book’s safe, that’s something. Never mind it’s missing its cover—a mishap at a caregiver’s hands. No longer a grave concern, because its gilt lettering stays in her head. “My treasure,” she tells the nurse, who swabs her lips. The tiny pink sponge on a stick she calls a mouth mop. The book a sort of Bible, pressed leaves and flowers crumble between the pages—dust—and a typed-out verse tucked there too. Cut from the Herald, 1927 jotted in her hand, the same as the inscription: To Dolly Cutler from Jimmy, Xmas 1935. Penned so she wouldn’t forget.

  So much room to forget; and who knew all this would take so long?

  Blind to the clock’s face and the nurse’s, her eyes distinguish only daylight from dark.

  “What’s the hour? What, only ten o’clock—not noon? Gad, is he on Cape Breton time, on pogey, the Reaper?”

  More deaf than she’ll ever be, the nurse squeezes her hand. “Hang on, darlin.’ You’re soon having a birthday—did I read that right?”

  Her 107th: who in God’s acre needs reminding? A ridiculous, ridiculous age.

  “No fuss, do you hear me? I won’t want any fuss.” Being polite, she coughs up a laugh.

  You can’t take it with you, they say.

  But like a treasure in an Egyptian’s tomb, maybe the book will follow her? The cover, adrift somewhere, lost perhaps in a stack of magazines, is or was rust-coloured cloth. Graven in her mind are Bliss Carman’s Poems and a laurel wreath in gold. “Our poet laureate,” a voice prods through the brightness, enough to give her a charge.

  Bliss’s lines brim in her mind: ants. They crawl over the whiteness of walls past the ceiling. Wherever the room empties into is grey-green: the ocean?

  The nurse’s shout is tender: “Pain, Nana? Are you having pain?”

  As ridiculous as living so long, being called ‘Nana.’

  Cold tea held to her lips. The fumbled straw.

  “Allergies, darlin’? Ever been allergic to anything, hon?”

  Her soul pulses. Words come from her throat: None, nothing, except to marriage. A flutter: numbness. The same feeling as in her fingers, the nerves hushed as if she’s wearing furry gloves.

  “I could’ve, might’ve, should’ve married him, I suppose.”

  He couldn’t wait to give it to her, hot off the press, an utter surprise—the nicest gift anyone could’ve thought of. No ribbon, no wrapping besides the paper it was shipped in. He had it there at the station when she returned from one of her jaunts. Home from Halifax, Toronto, Quebec?

  Never could sit still, could you Dolly? No grass grows under your feet.

  She was twenty-nine, just turned. Come back to find everyone she knew married, on to their third, fourth, even fifth child.

  “So what’s it like up there in Ontario?” The first thing he said, greeting her.

  “It’s all right. You find nice people everywhere.” Then she said how the sun had flattered the alders by the old shore and Little Pond when the train chugged in. “Gold, pure gold—even the cliff jutting out, the one like an animal’s snout. I wish you could’ve seen it.”

  “Me too—I’d have liked that.” Anyone else would’ve said she was cracked to notice. But Jimmy tucked her hand in his inside his coat pocket. His coat flapping open, no time to button it, hurrying from the office. Down Main to Legatto Street, past the washplant and the bakery at the first far-flung hoot of the whistle. He’d wanted to be sure and get there before anyone else could.

  Soot on the snow, coal by the tracks—winter had come early that year. His footprints and hers made a tandem trail through t
he back gate and into her parents’ yard. The narrow grey house crammed with kids, her brothers and sisters, was no place to take a fella. Nowhere you could expect a warm cup of tea or a handshake, not from Pa anyway. From Pa not even a “Who’d you say your father is?”

  That Christmas Jimmy pulled a few strings and got her hired on at the British Canadian Cooperative—the Co’p as they called it—in the store adjoining the office. She waited on miners’ wives out to blow their men’s wages playing Santa to hordes of kids. An orange for every sock in town, notwithstanding lumps of coal—clinkers from the stoves more apt? Humbugs, jawbreakers, and china dolls, tiny tea sets, prams big enough to carry swaddled kittens: just some of the things she sold.

  She endured the job by plotting her next move. Nearly a decade since she’d tried putting the place behind her, going off to art school. The first paved streets she’d ever seen were down in Halifax. The school some drafty rooms above an undertaker’s, fresh coffins on the street below. During classes the sounds, sometimes, of mourners.

  His people—Jimmy’s—were from the next town over, where ships loaded coal. A place of wharves, houses with widows’ walks and turrets, its roughness was more genteel than Lazytown’s. No hungry miners burning things down. Pa and her older brothers worked above ground: she had this to her credit. Though it made no difference to Jimmy’s widowed mother and sister who had little use for her, she could tell, when invited to tea. Watching the docks from their window, seeing the boats that would take you all over—to St-Pierre, St. John’s, Quebec City, Boston, New York.

  Jimmy had soft hazel eyes and a mildness, and clean hands if a little ink-stained, and fine, strong wrists—from pushing paper, her brothers teased. That day coming from the station, he’d set her suitcase down behind the garage where the boys’ Model T awaited spring’s potholes and Pa’s model ships rode waves of tools. Jimmy held her hand to his cheek and leaned down to kiss her—had to lean quite far, she was that short. She liked the scrape of his clean-shaven jaw against her smooth one, the warmth of him and his smell—of India ink and, possibly, the oil that greased the hinges on the office safe.