“Why not?” she asked me, and I said because I hadn’t been there so I didn’t know if they might have the things there that I liked, like the shining beads we were learning to stitch together at culture camp and a sledding hill like up the Dome or my father. And she nodded and said Jason would stay too. Then she asked me if I would watch after him. And I said yes, but then I said, “What am I to watch?”
And she didn’t answer but she said she would like me to stay in Dawson there with him if I could and not go to Memphis or Whitehorse, and then she said I should not be sorry if he did not wait for me after school was done. She said, “Later he’ll come looking for you, and it’d be a good thing for you to do if you’d look out for him then.”
So I said yes, and even after she died and after he didn’t go to school anymore, I still looked for him like she told me. And it didn’t matter anyway, what she’d said, because June never went to Memphis. Not even Jude did, he just went to Calgary and didn’t come home anymore. And June just stayed beside me in my room and didn’t talk about Jude or about Whitehorse either. Sometimes she said she knew now how I must feel, not to have anybody who looked like me or had once been a baby with me in our mother’s belly, how lonesome I must feel, and I said yes, and got in bed with her and let her hold me like she did when I was little and muss my hair with her hand until she fell asleep. And all the time, I kept watching Jason and what he did and said, so I’d know when he came looking for me.
“Did that feel like love to you?” he’d said to me, back at The Pit. All I’d wanted was to know what it meant to him to tell Mara’s sister what he did, and to change the Old Man story like he did. I wasn’t sure what he’d been getting at by saying it to her, if it was a way of starting to tell her something that he’d better not. I knew it would make trouble for him with Minnie and knew, too, he didn’t often tell his mother’s stories anymore, so he must have his reasons. I was wishing he would show them to me, his reasons. I felt that I knew him and why he was the way he was, but sometimes I needed him to show me his reasons.
I knew there was a way I could look at him so he didn’t get rough with me when I asked him questions, like he did with other people. I’d thought I could be the one, the only one, he’d make confessions to. Sometimes when I followed him, I imagined him turning around and seeing me there, and I would know in that second that he’d always known how I’d followed him, and we’d finally got to the place he’d been taking me all along, and then I’d say, “Confess to me,” and he’d tell me everything.
But instead, after he told her his story about Old Man, he went to a table by himself, and I went after him and in a soft voice that would make him not afraid or rough, I said, “Are you all right?” and he said, “Why would you come over here like something of me is yours. What we did by the river, did that feel like love to you?”
We’d gone to the river after that first night we saw her. I knew what it meant to Jason to see her show up here. Minnie maybe knew a little, but I knew the most what it meant. So I went with him to the woods by the river, and we didn’t say much at all, and then he put his hand in my hair so it hurt and he was pulling me toward him. And now I, who’d wanted to keep all his secrets for him, had told Aileen we kissed.
I’d got as far as the steps of our house, and now I sat down and tipped my head so I could see the deep blue centre of the sky, which the sun had circled away from, as if it wanted to escape to the earth but the sky kept pulling it back.
We didn’t just kiss.
When we were done, he had let me lie there in the curve of his arm for a little while, and then I felt him restless again and could hear the thoughts turning between his ears.
“It’s nice she came for you,” I told him.
“She didn’t come for me,” he answered.
“It’s you who’ll keep her here. She’ll want to know you,” I said.
“No,” he said. “She won’t.”
We didn’t go to the river again, and after that he never laid a hand on me or looked at me like he knew a thing about my body that my clothes didn’t show. But he went there with her. Just a few nights before, I’d followed her there to him and seen them sit not far from where he had done it to me, with their heads together like it was secrets they were sharing, like he was telling her everything.
It wasn’t her I’d been following that night but him, and I knew she would be going to him, I knew as soon as I saw her that first day after I was done singing that she’d get to following him too like I did, and I knew he’d make it easy for her to follow after. The sky was grey as stone when she went down to meet him there at the river, and I had to stay so far back that I thought I’d lost her until I heard them speaking together and I followed the quiet sound of their voices to where they were. I could hear what he said to her, but not always what she said back. He was talking all boastful like he would get, like he wanted her to think something was special about him. But then he said to her that sometimes he thought he went looking for a reason to be angry, because the feeling that was a feeling in his body of being angry for no reason was unbearable. I couldn’t see her face then, and I wanted to know if she looked scared or if she was sorry for him or thought it was like the stories he’d tell of himself, just him trying to get listened to. I wondered if he’d have been able to tell, if he’d told me that, that I knew he was saying something true.
Then he told her a story about one time when he was something like fourteen years old. He said he and his ma had had a goat and he tied it up behind the house, way far back in the yard. He put down a bowl of food real close to it, but not close enough that the goat could reach it. He didn’t change the food all week and it got so it stank, but the stink of it was nothing on the sound that goat made. He said his mother would holler at him to fix what was wrong with the goat, and he’d pretend to go and see it, but he’d only stand outside the house looking at it, listening to the sound it was making. Then he’d go inside and tell her he thought it had took sick and that he’d get some medicine for it, but he didn’t get anything at all for it. And after a week that goat died, and then he thought that maybe it wasn’t even for want of the food but for water that it died, because he’d thought it would be another week before he’d have to move the food closer. He hadn’t thought of the water. And he said he told his mother that the goat had died of its sickness, and when he said that, the woman Aileen asked, “Why did you do this thing?” And he said, like he had himself all figured out, “Because of how it felt to listen to that goat. Because of wanting to keep feeling like that and know why.”
And then I got a notion that he was lying now. You had to listen so careful to Jason. He’d tell you things about himself no one else ever would. And sometimes he wouldn’t tell you anything at all. And sometimes he’d tell you a lie that you were sure was a lie and then you’d figure out that it was the truest thing he’d told you. But I couldn’t remember him having any goats. His mother had rabbits for a while, I remembered, and then she didn’t anymore. But I didn’t remember a goat.
And then again, I thought, since his mother’s sister had come to town, he had fallen into telling the truth more often than he told lies. I wondered why it was. To his own mother, lies had come from his mouth like birds. But to her sister, he was different. I watched how he was, the danger and the slyness gone from him. I saw the lies leave his mouth. I’d thought I knew him best, and then I saw how much there was I didn’t know at all.
I didn’t know if she believed his story about the little goat he did not feed. After he was done with talking, she began to talk about her husband and I heard her crying and I listened, though I couldn’t hear a word, until he took her home.
This night was dark enough to remind me of nights in winter. Blue. Steady. I was sorry I had left the bar. I was sorry for the way it would feel shameful to go back again when I did, and I knew that I would. I knew if I went back now while he had drink in him, he would let me sit beside him and maybe he would even say he was sorry or do so
mething so that I’d know that he was, like ask me how June had been doing or make a show of blowing his cigarette smoke out to the side so it didn’t go in my face. If I waited a day or more, he would be so ashamed of himself it would make him mean with me, and it would be weeks till he’d come talk to me again. Weeks when he wouldn’t say “Angie,” or look at me sideways and just about almost smile.
So I knew I had to go back and knew I would, but I let myself look at the sky for a little longer. I decided to let myself have a count to a hundred before I had to go. I lay back till my head was on the boards of the porch beneath me, and I counted all the way, and then it was time to go back.
I took the longer way there. I went down almost as far as the river, and then as I cut up past the bank, I heard a sound. It was a woman crying sound, I knew it. I looked and there, by the pay telephone, there was a woman crying into the phone. And I knew the woman. It was his mother’s sister.
I called her name, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was just staring like that at the phone box, her ear all crushed against the phone. She didn’t answer me. And so I waited.
And then, after a while, I saw that she wasn’t listening to anybody say anything and so I took the receiver from her hand. She let it go and sat on the ground, while I put the receiver to my ear and listened to the sound of a ringing, unanswered phone, and then I hung it up.
“You go home now,” I said to her. She was slumped like dirty laundry on the ground against the phone booth.
“I drank too much,” she told me. “And then he told me, he said …” She stopped speaking.
“Do you know how to get home?” I asked her.
She gave a nod and looked up.
“You want some help to get home?” I asked her. I reached for her hand, but she snatched it away and then she got herself up. And I waited for her. And when she stumbled for a moment, I was there beside her and I caught her. And then we walked like that, her weight on me, all the way till we got to the hotel, and I remembered my father and how he’d be in my arms like that the nights he got paid, until the night he died and I didn’t have to go get him and take him home anymore.
I let her sit on the steps of the hotel while I went inside and told Ivan I was going to need some help to get her up the stairs. Ivan made a sound like all the air had got sucked right out of his mouth and said it was no good at all for the guests to see people drunk like this. He said it gave the tourists the wrong idea about the town.
“But she is a tourist,” I said. He just shook his head and said he didn’t want anything to do with it and I’d have to get her upstairs myself.
So I went back outside and I got hold of her as best I could, though she didn’t want me touching her, and I took her through the door to the stairs, while Ivan went outside to smoke a cigarette. Again and again I put her hand on the railing, and then when she took it off, I put it on again, and so finally we got to the top of the stairs. When I closed her door and came back downstairs, Ivan was behind the desk again and didn’t look up as I left.
Hardly anybody was left on the street now, and the sun leaned over town, pushing its way up. But when I opened the door to The Pit, nothing was much changed except the glasses that were emptier and the ashtrays that were filled. I walked to the bar where Jason sat next to Papa’s old friend John and I took a seat beside them. I felt Jason’s whole body notice me, but he didn’t look at me, didn’t let me have even just that second of knowing something about him and what he thought of me.
And I sat there with my elbows on the yellow wood of the bar, without a thought in my head of what was going to happen between us. And then a thing happened that made me not think about him anymore or how even though Mara’s sister was gone home now, he was as full of her as if you’d have to put him through the sluice to mine her from him.
And all that happened were four words and the touch of a hand. And after, John sat with his long legs stretched out to the floor beside me, him with his eyes soft and black, and me thinking how, how, how gentle a man could be. And who’d have thought a man you’d known all your life could one day look at you with soft, black eyes and there you’d be and not feeling like you were different than you had been when you sat down on that stool beside him, when you reached in your pocket for the money to pay and he caught your hand and said, “No, no, let me,” and you were left with the feel of his hand on your wrist and not looking any different than you had before, but everything now changed.
And I thought of that and could no more look at him than Jason could look at me, and I thought of everything I knew about him and wondered if he touched my arm again if I’d feel what I had again.
Then John stood up and said he had to go talk to Eloise about something. “Hold on,” I began saying and then had nothing more to finish it with. He looked at me and even Jason turned his face so he was watching the bar in front of me though even then he wouldn’t look at me. “We’re going to have a practice at my house tomorrow. June and me. And Lando. You could come by if you wanted. After lunch, you could come by.”
“I heard you were going to sing at that festival,” John said. “That’s something special, isn’t it. Lou would be proud as a rooster to have his little girl sing in front of all those people.”
“You could come by,” I said again, and John smiled at me.
“I’ll be seeing you,” he said.
I looked down to see Jason’s hand that he had laid there between us. I wondered what he meant for me to do with it and then thought for a moment of how it made me tired to wonder about another person and never be sure.
“You can’t talk to me like you did,” I said to him.
He shook his head, and I thought he would apologize, but instead he said this, he said, “Aileen betrayed my mother.”
I didn’t want to hear about Aileen, so I stood up, but Jason said, “Angie, Angie, sit down, while I tell this,” and so I sat down again.
And then he put his hands to his head and talked to the bar like it was listening to him. He said that when Mara and Aileen were little girls together, their mother hanged herself. Their father went crazy then and blindfolded the girls to keep them from seeing their mother. And later he refused to take the blindfolds away. And after that, the girls didn’t see anything anymore.
Except.
He said, “Except that Aileen did. After the first year, she says she started to take off her blindfold when her father wasn’t around. She was surprised by everything she saw. Nothing was the way she remembered it. She didn’t tell Ma what she was doing. She says she thought Ma must be doing the same thing. Aileen would test her, always asking her what she could see, waiting to catch her in a lie. But she always said she couldn’t see anything at all. Then Aileen got to be angry with her for not betraying her. She started to leave Ma alone whenever she could. Sometimes, she’d be gone for hours. She found some hippies two miles down the road who were fixing an old farmhouse. The husband taught her how to help him with the boats he built in his barn, and the wife would bring them hot tea and bread while they worked.”
That was the second I saw it happen. He wasn’t talking to me anymore. He was making a story out of it, talking to the story itself, like it was happening before him, becoming what had happened in the air between us. Like the words themselves were what it was built of.
“And then one day,” he said, “Aileen was coming back from their house, and as she climbed the hill toward home, she saw Ma on the hill, snapping the heads off of dandelions with her thumb and singing to herself. The ground was all uneven, so she couldn’t walk quite right, like over and over the ground itself would rise up and catch her by surprise, so she almost fell but never quite did. She looked alone in a way that made Aileen feel sick. And when Aileen put her blindfold on and went to her, Ma started singing. This is the song she sang: ‘Aileen smells like wood, Aileen smells like wood when she comes back, where does Aileen go and what is Aileen made of.’
“And then Aileen noticed her hands were rough wit
h sawdust, and she sniffed her fingers and thought she smelt nothing but wasn’t sure.
“And after that she didn’t take the blindfold off anymore. She didn’t visit the hippies again, even though whenever she was bored she’d get to thinking of the way the wood had felt against her hand. Almost two years passed before she saw again, and when she did, she couldn’t get her eyes to focus right, to see like she used to. Somehow the world had got blurred while she wasn’t looking at it.
“The doctors said it was not enough to have two eyes and a brain, the right parts in all the right places. The brain and the eye have to learn how to talk to each other, so the eye can tell the brain what it sees. But Ma’s eyes never had anything to say to her brain, so after a while her brain stopped listening for good.
“But Aileen’s eyes hadn’t gone so long without seeing anything at all, and so for her the world was like a light bulb that had gone dim. And slowly her brain started listening again to what her eyes had to tell it. After a few years, she could see enough to know what looks people had on their faces and how far away her hand was from the things it reached for. She couldn’t read or drive, but she could live like a normal person. She could have a normal life.
“But my mother hadn’t seen a thing for almost four years. For her, the light bulb went out altogether and it never went back on.
“Aileen told me that. And then she asked me to forgive her.”
“For keeping the secret from Mara?” I asked.
“For blinding my mother,” Jason said.
But I didn’t see how it was Aileen’s fault. It was wrong that she could see and her sister couldn’t. But, too, it was wrong that she was alive and her sister wasn’t. And I couldn’t see how either thing was her fault, not even though she’d lied. I told this to Jason, and he looked at me like I understood nothing.
In the Land of Birdfishes Page 10
