In the Land of Birdfishes

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  Aileen was out sitting on the steps of the porch when I got there, and I wasn’t expecting that.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” I said, and I stopped there, looking at her.

  Aileen had her hair pulled up with pins on top of her head and she was wearing a pale pink cardigan, buttoned up wrong, so it buckled on one side. She had a long, flowered skirt on that went down to the ground, and she’d tucked her feet under it. I couldn’t figure out if she was dressed like a little girl or an old lady. Something was changed in her.

  “Anyway,” I said. “I came by.”

  “Are you looking for Jason?”

  I said I was and followed Aileen in. It had been a few years since I’d been in Jason’s house, I realized, as I discovered how weird it was to see things just as they’d been. I wondered if Jason had kept it that way on purpose, to honour her, or if he just hadn’t bothered changing anything.

  Jason was on his knees in the kitchen, putting wood in the stove.

  “Is this the first fire?” I asked.

  He looked up at me and shrugged. “I guess so,” he said.

  “We haven’t lit the stove yet. There’s been a couple nights we could have used it though. It’s getting cold early this year. Going to be a long winter,” I said.

  Neither Jason nor Aileen answered me and so I got tired of trying to make conversation. I sat down at Mara’s old pine table that still had Mara’s old flowered tablecloth on it. “I brought some beers,” I said, pushing them down the table toward Aileen.

  She pulled one out and offered it to Jason. He shook his head and she opened it. I watched her take a long swallow. I remembered one time when I was a child, I was walking home from my cousin’s house at dinnertime one evening, and suddenly, between the road and the house I was passing, I saw a body in the snow. I went closer, not quite scared yet, still just interested, and saw it was a woman, her reddish hair stretched out in the snow and over her face, her arms and legs bent up into a ball. I touched the lady’s shoulder with my boot, and she moaned a little but didn’t move. I had to get my mother, who helped the lady stand up and then drove her to her house, me in the back seat, trying to see the reflection of the lady’s face in the window she was leaned against. After my mother came out of the lady’s bedroom, she told me the lady would be fine and we could go home now. “Too much alcohol,” she said. It was the first but not the last drunk I saw passed out in the snow, but I always remembered her. Sometimes when I was talking to white people, women especially, I’d remember the lady. Aileen made me think of her, how her hands weren’t even in mittens, just little fists in the snow.

  “So, you doing okay?” I asked Jason.

  “He’s fine,” Aileen said, and you could tell she didn’t want us to talk about it anymore.

  “Maybe it makes sense that she’d be the one to go. She was the last one to leave of the three of us. Maybe for her, it will take. While me and you grow old here.”

  “Shut up, Minnie,” said Jason. I looked at him more closely then, and honest to god he looked like when Mara died. Not a lick older either. He was almost as white as Aileen.

  “It’s okay,” Aileen said. I looked at her, her face all open, like she was exposed there, even if that was just another way of lying. “This is going to be all right. Jason is going to be all right.”

  “She doesn’t have any right though,” I said.

  They both stared at me.

  “Angie’s like my own sister. But she doesn’t have any right to take that kid from you, Jason.”

  Jason had left the stove door open and it was hot, hot, hot. It was just dim enough outside that you could see the patterns of the flames shifting the light around the room.

  Jason said, “I was going to tell Aileen a story.”

  “You and your stories,” I said.

  “He’s got two left to tell me,” she said. “Only one after tonight.”

  “Well, you’re going to live here now, aren’t you. All winter long. I’m sure you’ll get to hear lots more stories.”

  For a moment, Jason and Aileen had the same pinched face. Then Jason pulled a chair out and turned it around and sat on it backwards, so his arms hung over the back. “Pass me a beer, Minnie,” he said. I gave him one, and he said, “She had a child.”

  “No, she didn’t,” said Aileen quickly.

  “She did.”

  The brother cut his sister up into small pieces, so he could hide her in the ground, beneath the snow, where she’d be eaten by spring. It took him hours to clean up all the blood, and as he was cleaning, he heard the sound of someone crying.

  Be quiet, he said, thinking it was an animal looking for food. Go away!

  But the crying continued, and he thought perhaps it was the wind, and he closed the door.

  But the crying continued, and the brother became very afraid that it was Fire-man, come to cry for his dead woman. She’s gone to walk in the woods, he called, in case Fire-man was listening. She’ll be back in the morning. I am just making some breakfast for us now.

  But the crying continued, and finally, the brother went to find the crying sound. In a little cradle in the corner, he found a baby. It could only be a few days old. He knew it was the child of his sister and Fire-man.

  Then he became afraid, for he knew Fire-man would return, looking for his woman and his child. So he wrapped the baby in some caribou skins and took him in his arms and left the cottage. He went deep, deep into the woods, and waited for the sun to rise, so he could find his way home to his people.

  But the sun did not rise. He waited many days, but the cold got deeper and darker. He had to sleep on boughs of fir, blanketed with snow, the baby close to his chest so they would not freeze to death. He heard the trees around him whispering, Get the caribou. He did not want to see what the caribou would do when they came, so he ran and ran, the baby in his arms, and the sound of hoofbeats behind him. He stopped by a brook and made a fire to melt the ice so he and the baby could drink, but he heard the water say then, Get the fish. He saw, then, salmon frozen in the ice, and their tails began to move, slowly back and forth. They are only fish, he said. They cannot hurt me. One rose to the surface and watched him and the baby with its wet eyes, then it disappeared into the frozen brook, and he saw the flash of it moving in the ice, travelling far, far upstream. He left the brook then and began to climb toward the mountains, when his father and mother appeared before him.

  The fish say that you have killed your sister, said his father.

  The caribou say that you have taken her child, said his mother.

  He wept and said it was because he loved her. He told them how she had disdained his love.

  Fire-man is looking for you, said his father.

  He will find you, said his mother.

  He lay down on the ground then and held fast to the child. I will not let him take the child, he said.

  The fish have eaten the child, said his mother. And he looked and saw the child in his arms was eaten.

  The caribou beat out its brains with their hooves, said his father. And the brother saw that it was true, and he opened the bloodied caribou skins on the snow and wept upon them.

  I will kill you, said his mother. He raised his hands up to her to plead for his life, but she rose taller above him, till all the sky was her face, and the trees dwindled to bony sticks beside him, and the snow grew deeper, and the wind more bitter.

  Hide me, he said to the wind, but the wind blew harder. Bury me, he said to the snow, but the snow made a valley around him. Shelter me, he said to the trees, but they were only sticks and could shelter no one.

  His father then appeared by his side and said, You are my son. I will not let her harm you.

  I have loved you, Father, he said, his tears ice in his eyes. Do not leave me now.

  I will not leave you, said his father, because you will be always with us. No one will be able to leave you. You will be cold. You will be ice. You will be the snap of frozen branches tha
t betray the feet of hunters. You will be the moonlit glare of the river. You will be dark. You will be the sleeping of all living things. You will be waiting that does not end. You will be time that ages without passing. You will be the endlessness of all things, of all endurances, of all suffering. You will be weather and winter, and there will be no summer again.

  The brother thought to change his mind and ask to be only a mortal, not a god or a season but something that could, at last, die, but it was too late because already he had no mind to change, only snow and the thin light of the moon.

  I was quiet after Jason finished. Aileen stood and turned her back to us, but we could see that she put her hands up to her face.

  “Well,” said Jason. “I feel like getting out of here.”

  “You want to go down and see who’s at the bar?” I asked.

  “No,” said Jason. “I mean out of here.”

  “Let’s go up north,” Aileen said suddenly.

  I laughed at how seriously she said that, and how she said it like it was a place to go, but Jason answered her seriously. “Where would we go?” he asked.

  “I don’t care where we go,” Aileen said. “We could take the Dempster Highway. We could cross the Arctic Circle. Get away from all of this.”

  Our mother used to say, “Be careful not to take yourself too seriously.” I thought about saying that to Aileen sometimes.

  “I could call Peter tonight,” Jason said. “He won’t care if I don’t show up tomorrow. We could be gone by tomorrow.”

  Aileen leaned against the window, her forehead pressed against it. “Good,” she said.

  Then neither of them said anything. If we’d been out, I could have gone and talked to someone else, but I was in Jason’s house at Jason’s table, so I had to just wait and watch while the two of them sat there so quietly that the ticking of the clock seemed to shake the walls.

  The first time Lopita spoke to me, she had said, “You gonna come sit down here or did nobody ever teach you you can’t fuck with your eyes?” I had just got the job, my first real job, and was still focused on busing the tables fast enough that the waitresses would slip me five bucks from their tips. I was hardly twenty and as shy in Vancouver as I’d been ballsy in Dawson. I hadn’t been looking at anybody. Not even Lopita, who was more beautiful and weird-looking than anyone I had ever seen before. But when I looked at her then, I realized I didn’t want to stop looking, and maybe that was why Lopita had said that. To make me look. And keep looking.

  “I gotta go to the bathroom,” I said. Jason nodded and Aileen seemed startled to see me standing there. Jesus, I thought, as I found my way to the same old white-painted plywood door that you had to pull open and closed by a tiny round hole in the wood you could hook a couple fingers through. I’d always been surprised by how rundown this place was. Growing up, I thought, well, Mara had enough to do with Jason and being blind and all. But there was really no excuse for Jason not fixing the place up.

  I had to give a good tug to get my pants down. I was getting my mother’s ass. Violet had four children and was still as thin as a stick. The window in the shower was open, and cold air was coming through. The toilet seat was ice-cold. I pissed and listened to a dog barking somewhere outside.

  Lopita was from Mexico, and had a broad brown face and narrow black eyes. All her features were narrow and doll-like, lost in her wide face, except her mouth, which was much too big. It was full at the centre and then got thinner as it snaked up into her cheeks. It was a bent mouth. It was never closed or open in a normal way. It was always twisted or laughing and showing too many teeth. She wore coral lipstick. She made me sit down at one of her tables that first night while she counted all the money she owed the restaurant and separated out her tips. She didn’t give any of her tips to me. When she was finished, she put the biggest pile of money in an envelope, and the smaller pile she stuck in the back pocket of her jeans, which were too tight. Then she leaned across the table and put her hand under my face and kissed me.

  I let the water keep running over my hands after I finished washing them. The hot water felt so good. In the cold, my fingers always stiffened.

  Lopita had said, “Why did you get a job here? You’d make better money downtown.” I had explained, “Back home, a few times I heard American tourists ask why there were so many Mexicans in the north. One asked me once if it had been hard for me to get used to the cold. No one in the city wanted to hire me, and I thought maybe they would here if they thought I was Mexican. I never had Mexican food before, but Raul gave me a quesadilla after I filled out my application. I thought it was delicious. I never had anything like that before.”

  “Well,” I said now, as I walked back into the room, “I should get going, I guess.”

  “You just got here,” said Aileen, who was washing dishes at the sink. “Let me put some coffee on for you.”

  “If you’re going on a trip tomorrow, you’ll have to get ready,” I said. “I’ll stay out of the way of that.”

  Jason was still in his chair at the table. “I’m glad you came by, Minnie,” he said. “Thanks,” he said.

  “You can keep the beer,” I said. “Take it with you on your trip.”

  “Wait,” said Aileen. “I’ll walk you out.” She slipped her feet into a pair of worn leather sandals and pushed open the door, without looking back at Jason.

  I let her go out first and then closed the screen door behind me. “Yes?” I said.

  “I just wanted to walk you out,” she said. I found lies so boring. “Well,” she said, “I guess I wanted to ask you something, but I’m not quite sure even what, or how to ask.”

  “I’ve got to get home,” I said.

  “I know,” said Aileen. “I know. Just wait a moment. I’m trying to figure something out and I don’t have anybody to talk to about it.”

  “Except Jason,” I said.

  “But it’s especially him I can’t talk to.”

  I nodded slowly because I knew now where she was going.

  “I used to think that right was always something you could think up in your head. That if you did the wrong thing, it was because you hadn’t thought about it enough. Shit. Let me start again. You’ve known Jason a long time, haven’t you?”

  I nodded again. “When we were kids, I’d babysit him. Mara needed lots of help watching him. I mean, the watching part. Later we got to be friends.”

  “I know how much you matter to him. You must really know each other well.”

  “I don’t know that he wants to be known that well. But I know him better than anybody else, I guess. I guess that’s true.”

  The words came out of her mouth like she was chasing them out. “Stephan—my husband—he wants to try again. He asked me to come home. He said he gave it a lot of thought and he wants me to come home.”

  “And you figure that’s back in Toronto.”

  “That’s back in …” She scowled. “Say it to me straight.”

  “The way I heard it from Jason, you thought your home was here now.”

  “I did. And maybe I still do. I haven’t figured it out. I just haven’t figured it out. Maybe I could take him with me. Or maybe we should both stay here. But I wanted to ask you, do you think, if I were to go … Or even just with Angel gone … Do you think he’s going to be okay?”

  “Well,” I said. “I don’t think that really has to do with either one of us. And I don’t think it’s anybody’s business to say that about anyone else. Are you going to be okay? Am I?”

  “I know,” she said. She sat down on the porch steps, where she’d been when I arrived. “But everybody let him down, didn’t they. He told me about what his father did to him. I’m sure you must know that. And then when Mara died, it must have been like she was leaving him.”

  “I don’t know what you mean about ‘his father did.’ What did his father do? He didn’t do anything wrong to Jason.”

  Aileen’s eyes widened and then got sad. “So maybe no one knew then,” she said
softly. “His father used to hurt Jason and Mara.”

  “No, he didn’t,” I said.

  “Minnie, he did. He wouldn’t lie about a thing like that. He told me about the fights they’d have. He showed me where the table was broken from him once trying to hit her with the back of an axe.”

  “God, Jason,” I said. I thought of how he never spoke about his mother and of what he must have got going on in his head about her. I remembered the day, a couple months before Mara died, that the three of us were in the kitchen, and she wanted Jason to go split some wood for the fire. But Jason and I had planned to drive to Alaska that morning, to see my cousin Deke about a job. Deke said he could get Jason good pay for a job on his boat, and Jason had just finished school and thought he might like that, being out there on the water all the time. “Well, you’ve got it wrong,” I said.

  “He has a scar, Minnie,” she said. “I’ve seen it. He left a scar on his son.”

  “He didn’t,” I said simply. “It was her. It was always her.”

  “What do you mean?” She stopped. “You mean my sister?”

  “You can’t even blame her, not really. She was troubled, that’s what my father would say. She knew the Bible inside and out but she didn’t know anything about being a mother. There wasn’t anything Jason could do right. I saw her come down on him like a pack of wolves over nothing. She was half crazy when she shouted at him, every time she told him how worthless he was. Maybe all-the-way crazy. Because she loved him. Jason couldn’t tell that, but I could. She was obsessed with that boy. Even more than his father, and he loved Jason and was just heartbroken to watch her grind him down. But he was a coward and he worshipped Mara, and he could never get her to leave Jason alone. I remember once she came to get Jason from my house, and my mother and I watched from the window, her dragging him up the road and hissing something mixed up about hell or sin, and he didn’t even try to defend himself. He let her treat him like dirt and convince him that he was. My mother said, ‘That woman is as sad as the stones. Look at her try to beat her love out of that boy. Who do you think she’s punishing.’ You know, if she hadn’t been blind, somebody might have thought to take him from her. But the whole town pitied her, and Jason’s father too, and they were miserable enough to be their own punishment for whatever wrong they did. And no one thought of Jason.”