I watched her closely. I was thinking that maybe she wasn’t all that bright. I asked her, “What did he say to you?”
She began to speak and then shook her head. Not stupid though. She wasn’t stupid. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“He’s not like you, is he,” I said.
I heard her breathing slow. She stood up. “I’m going home,” she said.
“I wouldn’t think you’d have trouble finding someone else to kiss in this town,” I said. I knew my voice had changed. Gone hard. I said, “You go where you need to, but I don’t know why you’d go home. He’ll be waiting for you inside.”
She said, “You think you know him?”
I said, “All I meant was I don’t think he’d be an easy person to love.” She looked in the window of the bar. Ha. There were some women who could only love men who scared them a little. “I’m going inside,” I said. “You do whatever you want.”
She looked at me and then walked away, down the street, in that slow way she had. Her face and figure were soft, despite the sharpness of her features, but from behind, she looked so thin. From behind, she could have been a child shuffling home.
Inside, Jason was back at the bar again, and Minnie was talking to someone at another table.
“You dare me?” Jason was demanding at the bartender, who looked bored. She shrugged her shoulders. “You dare me?” he said again.
I came up beside him and opened my mouth to speak, but he turned away, grabbing a pack of matches from the bowl on the bar. He whipped it open and bent the top match back, and in one fluid movement, like a snap of his fingers, he flicked it against the striker and then lit the entire pack on fire. Then he raised the burning matchbook in his right hand and held his outspread left palm above it. “You count for me,” he told the bartender. “I’ll hold it as long as you say.”
The bartender looked faintly interested then. She tipped her head to one side, letting her honey brown curls fall over her shoulder. She had the eyes of a cat, and they narrowed as she gazed at him, unblinking. “One,” she said.
He held his palm so it was less than an inch above the flame and kept his eyes glued to the bartender’s.
“Two,” she said.
The other men at the bar had started to pay attention. I could tell from the way Jason settled into his seat then, a cocky languor easing over him, that he enjoyed their eyes on him. His hand was steady as the flames crept down the matches.
“Jason,” I said sharply. “Stop that. Stop it right now.”
“Three,” said the bartender, an insolent smile sliding across her face. She lowered her elbows onto the bar and leaned over them, so her face was as close to Jason’s outstretched hand as his.
“You’re going to burn a hole clean through your hand, Jason you fool,” said one of the men, but the others shushed him.
“I don’t feel a thing,” Jason said coolly. “You know those guys that teach themselves to eat poison, a little at a time? I’ve been training myself so I don’t burn. One time I lit my whole hand on fire. It just burned itself out. As far as fire goes, I’m goddamned invincible.”
“Four.” The bartender took her eyes off Jason’s at last to stare with the rest of us at what was left of the matchbook in his hand. The paper matches were burned to the base and all that remained was the thin piece of cardboard that had held them all together, burning between his fingers. I smelled a sweetness in the smoke and thought it was the seared flesh of his palm and fingertips.
“Jesus Christ,” I hissed and watched as my hand flew out and clumsily knocked the matchbook from his hand. It scuttled across the bar and the bartender whipped a glass out from the shelf below and caught the last burning scrap as it slid over the edge. Then she turned and dumped it down the sink, without another word.
As if nothing had happened, Jason pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a new matchbook from the bowl. I tried to catch a glimpse of his left hand, to see how badly it was burned, but he clenched it in a fist and tucked it under his other arm.
I sat down beside him. He didn’t look up, but took three swallows of beer in a row.
“She went home,” I said at last.
He took another swallow of beer.
“You want a shot?” I said. He shrugged and I ordered two shots of whiskey. When we drank those, I ordered two more.
“So did you talk to her, or what,” Jason said.
“Just for a minute. She was out there smoking.”
“Angel doesn’t smoke.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. She was out there smoking.”
Jason took a drag on his own cigarette and thought about that.
“She told me you kissed her,” I said after a moment.
“Who’d he kiss?” said Minnie. I hadn’t realized she was behind me.
Jason looked at Minnie and then pushed a cloud of smoke out between his parted lips without taking his eyes from her.
“I’m sorry, Jason,” she said. “You hear me, I’m sorry.”
He turned back to the bar but said nothing.
“Oh Jesus fuck, Jason. Screw you.” She turned and I thought she would leave, but then she leaned in to Jason and whispered, “You think this woman is your friend? You want to call her your family? I’d like to know who you think is going to be here to take your shit when she’s gone. You want to tell her all your secrets, you go right ahead. And then you watch her go. What are you going to do, follow her?”
She turned to me then. She said, “You know he’s left this town three times already. Once he went to Edmonton, to get some oil job there. He was maybe sixteen years old. Dropped out of school for this job. Said goodbye to everyone. Not three months later he was back. He said it was just a contract job, but when he left, he was all like he was never going to see one of us again. Then he said he was going to school. Someplace down in Prince George. Was gone nearly six months that time. Came back and said it rained too much. Said there was nothing they could teach him there. Last time he went to Whitehorse—Whitehorse! Didn’t even cross the border. Said he had some government job lined up there. I don’t believe there ever was a job. Most people don’t. Thought it was just more of Jason’s stories. And what was the reason that time, Jason? Why’d you come back?”
I didn’t look at Jason. But Minnie did. She pulled a stool up in front of Jason so she had her back to me. “Jason,” she said. “I don’t blame you for coming back. You know I don’t. But I wish to fuck you’d stop going around like you were too good for us here. Every time you come back here you’re madder and harder to take. You treat Angel like shit. And what’s it for? They no more want you in the south than this woman here will give another thought to you come August.”
“You should go,” I said.
“Angel’s worth ten of him,” Minnie said. “If he’d just get over wanting what doesn’t want him, maybe he’d see that. Maybe he’d stop going around with that attitude like he’s better than us, or that look like a beat dog.
“Fuck you, Jason,” she said. And she pushed the stool into the bar so hard it toppled to the ground. She left the bar without speaking to anyone.
“Will you get me another shot,” Jason said.
“Sure,” I said, “sure.” I ordered two.
Into the silence and the drinks between us, I said, “I turned forty last week.”
“Oh,” said Jason. “I didn’t know.”
“Should have,” I said. “Her birthday too.”
“Oh,” said Jason. “I forgot. I guess I forgot.”
“That’s okay,” I said. My tongue slipped a little on the s. I was not used to drinking, and now I had drunk too much, too much. “I did too, almost. But all I’m saying is, you’re awfully old to be the son of a forty-year-old. How old are you anyway?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Oh,” I said. I pushed away what remained of the whiskey. No more drinks. “Oh Jesus. Jesus, Mara. Sixteen.”
“She told me she was glad to have me,” said Ja
son. “She said my father wouldn’t have married her if it hadn’t been for that, and if he hadn’t married her, she couldn’t have left the school.”
“It was bad there?” I asked.
Jason shrugged. “It wasn’t good,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “I know, I know.” I looked at the boy, who looked younger when he drank, when his face went all soft around the eyes and mouth like it was now. I could tell his eyes weren’t focusing as easy as they should, and I thought mine might be the same way. “He was from here, your dad?” I asked.
“Yep,” said Jason. A man paid for his beer beside us at the bar and, without a word, slid one over to Jason. Jason took it with a nod, and peeled the label off the glass in one solid piece. “She was in school in Alberta,” he said. “My dad was working there on a job, and he got in a fight that had him in jail for a spell. She was with this Christian group that would go there and read to them from the Bible. Except of course, she didn’t read. She could just talk it at you. She had the whole Bible in Braille, but most of the time she’d just talk it at you.”
Think of the little girl with yellow hair and that voice like mine but not mine, that other that was always and in all things like me but not me. That small hand in my own small hand.
I said, “She was blind? She was always blind?”
Jason said, “She could tell if there was light or dark. She could see if something moved around her.”
Remember that it was not a little girl who got pregnant with the child of a man who did “spells” in jail. It was another Mara. A tall one, grown older, like me. Grown tired, too, and a little ruined.
I said, “Was she happy?” My voice was so quiet and it was almost the voice of a yellow-haired child.
Jason said, “Sometimes my father beat her. Not very many times. Only once I ever saw him hit her with his hand closed. But she always seemed relieved afterwards. Happier. Once, he knocked her jaw so hard I heard it move in its place, and I was behind him with a plate in my hand, with it over his head about to come down, when I saw her look up from the dishes and there was a peace on her face I never saw before.”
There was something wrong with my heart or lungs or something. There was a thing that was wrong that was why I couldn’t breathe. I thought I would say his name, Jason, and tell him he had to stop talking so he could call the hospital. I thought, was there a hospital in this place? What kind of place was it where you couldn’t breathe and someone wouldn’t stop saying these things to you and there wasn’t a hospital?
Jason said, “I don’t know why it would be that she would be glad then. I don’t have half an idea. But it makes me think that no, she wasn’t happy.”
“Jason,” I said. “Jason.”
Jason said, “It’s true what Minnie said. I tried to leave. I kept trying to leave. I don’t know why I can’t.” He ordered another drink from the bartender and pushed it toward me. I took it though I didn’t want it.
I said, “Jason. I don’t have anything to go back for. I’ll stay here as long as you let me. I won’t go like she said.”
Jason said, “She loved him though, you know. I mean, she really, really did.”
I said, “Or say you’ll come back with me. My husband can get you a job at his company. He works in construction. We could go now if you wanted.”
Jason said, “And I’ll tell you something. He worshipped her.”
“I couldn’t have known about this, Jason,” I said. I shook his arm. “I couldn’t. How could I know about this?”
Jason said, “I didn’t say you could. I didn’t say shit to you.”
There was that little girl with her hair still like pale honey and her face that would trust anybody. There was the way you could know the body of another—in the dark you could, sightless, know another person by the touch of them, by the way their hands met your own, in the air, their hands closed around your own, as if they’d been reaching at the very moment you knew that you needed, wanted to put your hand out into the dark and hope and hope—
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’ve been so sorry. I was going to tell her. I came here because he left me and I came here because I loved her, I did. But I came here, too, because I was going to tell her, I was going to say I’m sorry, and she isn’t here and I can’t tell her, so I have to tell you.”
He said, “I’ve got some money coming to me, you know. You don’t have to give me a job. I’ve got money coming. They’ve been in talks for years now, and they say word’s going to come any day now. Any day now. We’re all going to get money from the government. For what they did here. I’ll be a rich man then. I’ll be able to go anywhere.”
“Jason,” I begged him. I said to him, “Jason. Let me tell you I’m sorry. Let me tell you what happened.” I said again and again until he listened to me, “Let me tell you what happened.”
Mara
NINE
I HEARD THEM AND LAY STILL, afraid to move. It had been so many years since I had heard another child speak, and if I listened hard enough their voices sounded like hers.
“She’s sleeping,” whispered one. “Megan, we shouldn’t wake her.”
The other voice was more like the one I longed for, soft as wind and sharp as the end of a saw. “It’s the daytime.” I felt the mattress beneath me buckle and thought, That is her foot kicking the mattress underneath me. “Wake up,” she said. “Wake up. Open your eyes.”
The other girl whispered, “Maybe her eyes are closed because she’s blind.”
“Don’t be stupid, Elizabeth,” said the one named Megan. “She’s lazy. She’s lazy and blind. I never heard of us having a lazy, blind cousin. Why should I have to share a room with her. And she’s ugly too. Look at the colour of her hair, it’s like no colour at all. It’s like the tail on the end of corn.”
“Corn silk,” I said. “Da said it was like corn silk. Mother’s was like that too. He said she must have grown out of a field of corn and some farmer came and picked her like a piece of corn, and she was so beautiful he let her go, while all the other corn had to go to the mill and get cut into little bits for all the chickens and animals to eat.” I didn’t hear either of them say anything after that, so I kept my eyes shut and said, “And that’s why he fell in love with her. Because no other ladies had hair like corn silk or got picked from the field by a farmer, and so there was only one like her and that made Da love her. But now she’s dead, nobody loves her at all.”
“Jesus loves her,” said Megan, but she didn’t sound sure.
“I’m sorry you don’t have a mother,” said Elizabeth. “Mom said—”
I sat up and said to Megan, “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are. Jesus did not love Mother. Jesus despised her as God did. As Da did. She died like Judas died, falling headlong, burst asunder in the midst. Our bodies are the members of Christ.”
It was quiet all around, and then Megan said, “I don’t want you here. I don’t want you in my bedroom.” I heard the door open again and then heard footsteps down the stairs and Megan calling for her mother. I thought I was all alone in the room, and then I felt a soft, warm hand take my own. It could have been her hand, and I held onto it like the ocean holds the sand.
Angel
late June 1996
TEN
SO I FOLLOWED HIM SOMETIMES. Could have felt shame about that, yes, could have. Could have felt it like my mother and how she’d look at me sometimes and say, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Angie. Weren’t you raised to be better than you are?”
But I never was, oh no, I never was. Not ashamed of that. And if there were things I thought when I was in my own bed, things I wouldn’t have told even June there, on the other side of that small window between us, that was not the same as shame. That was something different. If I let my hand go down beneath the sheet, looking for myself, if after, I lay with my hand
still wet under the sheet, and felt it in me deeply, was made to cry after that and feel the salt drops without sound fall on the pillow and still feel as sweet and alone as a person could feel—it wasn’t shame that made me cry.
She told me to watch after him. Before the thing that happened to her had happened, when I thought it was only for lack of proper working eyes that she couldn’t watch her son herself. I’d come over to see him, was still young then, maybe only ten, eleven years old, and stood there in the doorway, knotting and unknotting some bit of cotton in my hand, a scarf or a thing like that. She was just sitting at the table, peeling potatoes, and I wondered if it was safe for her to do that, how she’d know so she could not cut herself or get blood in the potatoes, and so I watched close and sharp as a knife to see if there was red there in the potatoes. She said, “Angel, didn’t you come by yesterday, too, looking for him?”
And I said yes, I did, and the day before that too. I said he’d been busy or something, I guessed. I said he’d forgot to wait for me after school was done.
She cut the potatoes still and didn’t stop doing that all the time she talked to me. She looked at me as she did it, but I knew she didn’t see me or anything. She said, “Angel, your mother and your father, have they ever been anywhere but here?”
I said Papa went sometimes to the whale camp and once he even let Charlie and Jude go with him, but not me and June. I said June said it wasn’t fair because she was the same age as Jude and anyway they didn’t like to do things different or apart, but Jude gave her a look and she shut up fast.
And she said, “Did your mother ever go away from here? Down south, I mean?”
And I said no, I didn’t think so. And she asked me if I wanted to go away somewhere when I was grown, and I said Jude and June were going to get an apartment, they already had it decided, and June said Jude was going to let her decorate it and she already knew what it was going to look like. They said it might be in Whitehorse or maybe in Memphis, because of Jude liking Elvis so much. But they said even if it were in Memphis they’d let me come be there with them. But I told her that I didn’t want to go to Memphis or Whitehorse neither.
In the Land of Birdfishes Page 9
