We walked up springy planks to the front door.
Inside, my mother didn’t say much about how unprepared the house was for a birth, not even when she heard the roar of the propane heaters inside the front door, glanced at the arc lamps casting sheets of light on the drying plaster walls. The water in the kitchen was a garden hose stuck through the window, the stove to heat water and to warm the pepper tea was a camp stove.
This was one of Mr. Giacomo’s biggest plans — to present a fine home to his wife — and the lack of order in the hallway and in the kitchen frightened me. It made me feel tired just to look at the kitchen shelves covered with a fine plaster dust and the stacks of labelled cardboard boxes. I wanted to go home.
Bothered by the lack of preparation, my mother spoke to Mr. Giacomo in a clipped, flat voice: John, she said, when she walked into the kitchen and saw the garden hose stuck through the window and all the pots still in boxes, I need pans and hot water.
Yes, he said, I’ll get those for you. You go ahead and check on my wife. He moved boxes around on the floor, reading their labels.
The pots and pans are in here somewhere, he said, hurrying now. I’ll find them!
When she climbed the stairs to the bedroom, her hand gliding along the varnish-flecked banister, I saw my mother slow and turn to me with a look of disbelief, for the upstairs, much disused, still smelled of mould and rat droppings and the ammoniate smell of squirrels’ nests. She shook her head, kept climbing to the bedroom.
I think Mrs. Giacomo was in too much pain to even notice me; the contractions were coming on full. Her head rested on a green cushion, a cushion from the sofa in the hallway downstairs. She looked at my mother, her mouth a small round O of pain and her fingers clasped on her belly. Her eyes were the colour of the bloom on ripe plums.
I was helping John to move in, she apologized, in the way that people do when they feel they’re being inconvenient.
It happens, my mother said. You can’t always be exactly sure when a baby is due. She went about hooking the rubber sheet on the mattress corners. She told me to go downstairs for water and towels.
In the kitchen, Mr. Giacomo, pulling open boxes, asked me how things were going. He placed two clay bowls on a shelf above the counter.
When our baby is born we’ll drink from these!
Those bowls looked as lumpy as cooking apples.
I was eager to help, and even now I wonder at how helpful I wanted to be, thumbs pressed on a pot lid as I carried steaming water up to the room, by the drying plaster walls. I wanted to show my mother that I could be useful. Still, I felt something was wrong and I kept busy in order to ignore the feeling.
My mother’s voice was sharp and bitter, and I kept asking what can I do and I didn’t mind when she snapped at me, I can’t keep telling you, placing towels under Mrs. Giacomo’s hips, her back propped with pillows, and Mr. Giacomo calling from the foot of the warped stairs, What do you need?
I went up and down those stairs to fetch towels and water, by the shadowless flare of light on the muddy-smelling walls. When I climbed the stairs for the last time, my mother called out of that hot, steamy room with its painted-shut windows, her voice calm now, and I thought to find some delightful baby that you lift in your arms to feel its struggling, wailing life.
I walked into the room and my mother turned the wrapped infant towards me. I saw it take two gasps like a trout drawn onto ice, and then it lay still in her hands. All of a sudden that room smelled of the winter lake, of the warm, lichen-coloured water that sometimes welled to shore, spreading out from the deep hot spring.
She just leaned over this baby, quiet, as if listening for some far, piping tune, her eyes wide and still, without reflection.
Later she would tell my father that she had immediately brought the baby to her mouth to breathe for it, but that was after Mrs. Giacomo had shouted at her, Do something!, to shake her out of a dream. And even then she had to think of what to do, like someone who has awoken and doesn’t recognize where she is.
I don’t think she even heard Mrs. Giacomo shout at her. She just stood there at the foot of the bed with the still one in her arms, just stood there. I could see by the bewildered look in her eyes that she had suddenly lost all confidence in herself. I could feel her cold grief creeping into my belly and along my inner arms, and I clapped my hands to startle her.
5
A lot of trains pass through our station at night. The westbound trains carry grain, coal and lumber to the seaports. The eastern trains bring freight from Asia. I remember the very first train to pass through our valley delivering Japanese cars to Ontario. It was delayed at the station that spring and a lot of people went out to look at it.
That train carried Toyota Celicas, Nissan Skylines, and Datsun 240Z s. They were all kept unlocked. I’d never seen so many cars stacked like that before. They looked like ornaments; a trick of light had raised a metallic glow on them.
Rose and I climbed the double-decker car flats to sit behind steering wheels that smelled of vinyl and oily metal. We were really becoming friends that spring, a few months after the Giacomo baby died. She climbed quicker than I could, like a raccoon, and now and then she’d look down at me to laugh encouragingly. I could smell on the cars an odour of oil and diesel smoke. I climbed into one and sat behind the steering wheel just to pretend I was driving past the 4th Street girls at the village fountain who were tossing water at each other from cider bottles, past Bruce Hiraki who was the son of my father’s friend Mr. Hiraki. He was a little in love with Amy Mallone, whose father owned the café Mr. Giacomo was to buy, and rather than kiss her, he scooped water from the fountain to toss at her. I sat there, the train at rest, and Rose called down to me,
Want to drive a Nissan Skyline? To the coast?
Want that one down there?
She climbed with ease, her arms strong from working horses in summer. I’d seen her walk Clydesdales down our main street, when she brought those horses out of the forest for the fire season. Rose’s family were horse loggers on the Big Bend where our river turns round, flowing south instead of north. In the fall of ’67 they’d sent her to our village to attend school, and she’d stayed on Mrs. Beruski’s farm south of town. She was around sixteen then, with those big horses walking beside her past the Columbia Bakery. They followed her like two obedient dogs. She was feeding them cider apples from her pocket. Now and then one would nuzzle her shoulder, snuffle the lank hair at the nape of her neck.
Those horses were the size of a full-grown moose. Their iron shoes rang out on the pavement. She liked to look in their serene eyes then. Had one of those animals misplaced a step, it could have crushed her foot. Up close they seemed to dwarf the cars parked along the sidewalk, blocked them from view. Her family used them to haul logs out of the forest, to the shores of Olebar Lake. She whistled to make them lift their head to look at her, then they went back to nuzzling her pocket, pushing her along so that she laughed. She was walking them to Mrs. Beruski’s farm on the flats south of our village; they’d stay there till the fire season was over.
Do you want to drive to the coast, Rose was saying, in this one? She was calling down to me through the open window of the car she was in.
Not really to go to the west coast. She was already pregnant then and she needed a friend. I wasn’t sure of her, maybe because I felt her need for a home where she’d feel safe, a need that I didn’t know how to answer. Still, I liked her laughter that was an invitation to cross the distance between us.
Sure, I’ll go to the west coast with you, I said then. You drive, I’m coming up there.
Well, come on then! and I heard her voice settle and grow more assured. Maybe it was then that she began to trust our friendship.
6
Later in the summer, Rose and I were lying on our bellies on Michael Guzzo’s raft off Olebar Beach. Michael Guzzo was Rose’s boyfriend. She’d met him in Burton. When she described him, his unkempt sandy hair, the green logger’s vest that he a
lways wore, his mild, chestnut-coloured eyes, I knew who he was. Before he left to travel in the winter of ’69, I’d seen him in the Grizzly Bookstore from time to time, going through the secondhand books.
We were kicking the raft through the still water at dusk. I heard voices from the picnic tables under the bone dead oaks near the point. I heard two voices — a man’s and a woman’s — arguing and hushing each other. Rose said, That sounds like your mother.
When Mr. Giacomo shouted, You girls must be cold out there!, I recognized his voice, and he went to the barbecue pit to build us a fire. Whoever was with him had left.
I wondered what he was doing there. It was the first time that he seemed really interested in us. I thought then that the woman he was arguing with could have been my mother, but I couldn’t tell. She had stayed away from the Giacomos since their baby’s death and I didn’t understand what she could be doing talking with him on Olebar Beach.
Later in the fall, I’d find out why. At our kitchen table, my mother would spread adoption papers before Rose, and then I’d understand that she and Mr. Giacomo had been planning this all summer, that they’d met on the beach to talk about the adoption of Rose’s child.
Rose was at the mast and I was in the water, kicking along the raft. By then it was almost dark, though I could see the oaks on shore that had died in the winter of 1968. I told her that I’d got a summer job working relief in a fire tower and that I’d be gone maybe weeks at a time. She looked at me then, and I saw sadness draw into her eyes, as if she’d miss me. I was surprised at how she felt; we’d only been friends for a few months. She turned on a flashlight secured to the mast with duct tape. The beam swept the beach, picking out Mr. Giacomo sitting on a drift log.
Rose, don’t shine people, I said, embarrassed.
Well, at least I’m not flashing him, she replied.
We dragged the raft onto the gravel and went to sit by the fire, shivering in towels. We had stayed out on the water too long, and because the lake was rimmed by mountains on the western side, darkness had fallen suddenly.
Girls, it’s too dark to bike home, Mr. Giacomo said. I’ll give you a ride.
He owned the only taxi in our village, and he’d driven to the beach in that car. We loaded our bikes into the trunk. The whole time Rose was laughing, because to fit two bikes into the taxi was like trying to cram nine feet of trellis wire into a tin can: jumble of handlebars, pedals in spokes, hands blackened with grease and road dust, a smear on Rose’s cheek.
She had never actually met Mr. Giacomo before.
She was laughing out of shyness and not wanting to look at him.
Amused, he stood watching us. When the bikes were in the trunk he cinched down the lid with rope. The pouches under his eyes looked bruised and his strong hands that worked the rope were as small as Rose’s.
I’d known the Giacomos for years.
His wife and my mother had been friends since high school. My father had worked with Mr. Giacomo when he was a young man, delivering mail to the internment camp in New Slocan during the Second World War. He and my father bought vegetables grown in the camp to sell in our village.
At his feet were a small grey satchel and a sketch pad. He took some papers out of the satchel to show to Rose. Then he looked at her, seemed to change his mind, and put them away.
The car that he drove us home in, this “Johnny’s Taxi,” a 1964 Chevrolet, used to belong to my mother. One summer she’d worked in the canning factories of Westbank to make the money to buy it, and then she went for her driver’s license.
It turned out that she was afraid to drive that old boat of a car: the pedals confused her and sometimes she stepped on the gas when she meant to brake, the car surging, and she’d pull over to the shoulder gravel in a sweat.
And then there weren’t a lot of births in the valley, so she couldn’t afford gas or repairs. She got the Italian truck farmers to pick her up when their wives were in labour. In the spring of 1967 she sold that black Chevrolet to Mr. Giacomo, and he made it into “Johnny’s Taxi,” the letters stenciled in white paint on the front door panels. This was just one of his moneymaking ideas. He owned vineyards and orchards south of our village; for a while, he was even a trail guide with horses.
Rose, shivering in the back seat, her shirttails wet and stuck to her swimsuit, a striped terrycloth towel draped over her knees and bunched under her so that she wouldn’t wet the vinyl seat, asked who Johnny was.
“Johnny,” he told her, was his first name: John Giacomo.
We looked at each other and laughed: he was no Johnny. Just as the village called the priest “Father,” so they called Mr. Giacomo “Mr. Giacomo.” It was just the way people talked about him. He did all kinds of jobs and dressed like any working man. Looking at him you’d think he was poor, but we all knew he was rich.
We drove through the Palliser Valley past the Italian truck farms, past Mr. Pradolini’s house and Mrs. Hiraki’s house, both two-storey clapboard WWII houses that had been moved up from Renata after the dam was built.
Down there, nobody bothered with curtains, so you could see deep into kitchens and living rooms and the barns were wide open, lit up, with someone bedding down the cows, and I saw Mrs. Hiraki look up from her kitchen table at the car on the gravel road; she came to the window to watch us go by.
She looked out in a peering, alarmed way, as if our lights meant an accident or a death. I saw her raise a hand to shield the kitchen glare so she could see through. Now on her own, she came from a valley family that had been here since before the war. Her husband had died of a heart attack, after he retired from the Odin Mill, and her son Bruce Hiraki had recently died in a logging accident south of the Big Bend. He was felling a cedar when a root-rotted fir on the edge of the clearcut tumbled and caught him on the side of the head. I remembered my mother telling me about the accident. News travelled quickly in our village. I remembered seeing him toss water at girls at the village fountain, the way he looked at Amy Mallone with a merry glint in his eye. And I felt a stillness settle in me then, a deep ache in my chest.
I was there when the tree hit him, Mr. Giacomo told us. I helped lay him out in the truck bed and we took him to the hospital in Naramata, but it was already too late. He was bleeding from the ears and he’d already stopped breathing. We had to drive for miles along the reservoir before we could turn west below the dam, towards the hospital.
Mr. Giacomo was quiet for a while. Then he said, That dam was built ten years ago. Before it was built, in winter we’d get a week of twenty or thirty below. Six feet of snow fell. Now the weather has changed, he said, because of the reservoir behind the dam. You can even plant grape vines here.
I thought to myself then, I’ve never seen that dam. I’ve heard that it flooded the entire Renata valley, now a lake. Though I have never seen it, I dream of that water sometimes, pressing down on a drowned forest and I’m swimming over stripped trees that have lost their needles and that peer up at you like miles of ghosts.
These were all dirt farms we were going by, and the car lit up corn or sweet potatoes, or a tororo field, a quarter-acre vineyard, the nets furled and bunched on an overhead wire. You could smell manured soil and the sweet, heavy scent of grape flowers that, early for that time of year, spread through the valley on still evenings.
He told us he was the one to start wine growing in our valley and where once there had been alder copses, scrub land, and apple orchards there were now vineyards. He had even gone to Italy to buy Veneto vines that would grow on the village slopes and produce grapes that would ripen here in autumn. Over the years he’d bought up over fifty acres south of our village.
Whenever he’d come by our 4th Street house or my father’s paper mill, not often over the past years, he never said hello to me. Once when I was standing right in front of him — was I eleven then? — holding out a roll of paper that he’d just bought from my father, he took it out of my hands and gazed right through me.
Now he was looking
at me in the rear-view mirror, studying me, and I felt a little afraid of him. I sensed he wanted something from Rose, and maybe he had already begun to suspect I might get in the way.
As we drove along, he explained that he was redecorating the downtown café he’d just bought from Mr. Mallone with things he’d picked up on Shido Island during the war and that he was bringing in ash wood tables and chairs that would need to be varnished. Afterwards there would be regular work, serving.
You girls have finished high school, he said. Do you want to work for me?
What will you call it, Rose asked, Johnny’s Café?, and in her high spirits, in her not having to pedal home in the dark, she burst out laughing.
He didn’t turn round to look at her. He kept himself still, maybe listening to her laughter. Rose, wiping the tears from her eyes, was suddenly quiet. She looked at me and shrugged, though I was sure she felt the change in him too, and it confused her, made her unsure.
After his stories and his offer, he was quiet. Maybe he was hurt by her laughter or maybe he was just amused; I couldn’t tell by the expression in his eyes when he glanced at me in the mirror.
We drove into the village past the roundhouse, the doors flung open and spilling out light. We stopped in front of Mr. Giacomo’s house on 4th Street. On his porch, he showed us a 30 power telescope and a drawing board lit up by a battery-powered reading lamp. He told us that he was sketching the basaltic areas south of Vieta and the Imbrium Sea on the moon, difficult because of the way the light passed quickly over the Crisium Plains.
He had to sketch quickly, he said, because the moon kept slipping out of the telescope’s viewing area.
Ten degrees of brightness for the peak of Aristarchus, he said, the highest degree of brightness on the moon. It could only be expressed by the purest white paper. Five degrees for the walls of Argo, expressed by slight shading. He drew on paper my father made; it got whiter as it aged.
House of Spells Page 2
