House of Spells

by Robert Pepper-Smith

  It would be so easy just to give up, to not try to fathom what I was beginning to feel. Last night I dreamt of the old judge’s house. I felt that someone unseen had taken my hand, to lead me through its many rooms. In the dining room, a meal had been laid out on a big table lined with chairs. In another room men and women were dancing, all the furniture pushed to the walls. There was an aliveness to the house that came from the fullness of its memories. It felt cared for, and its memories reached out to hold up those dancing men and women, to give them the space of their laughter and desire.

  When I awoke, I remembered how good I’d felt in that dream house, so welcomed. That feeling seemed to promise so much: that Mr. Giacomo would really help my friend Rose; that the Giacomos would overcome their grief and find the acceptance they wanted in our village.

  And then I remembered how the house now stood, grey with neglect, in a bladed clearing with scarred fir roots sticking out of the earth. I remembered how it smelled of mildew and squirrels’ nests. I felt then that Mr. Giacomo’s kindness would have a terrible cost.

  7 AM, the sawmill whistle blows. They are cutting yew, you can smell it. It smells like wet cinnamon. Through the fire tower binoculars I watch geese rise through the heavy mist on the river, lifting off the sandbar. The clouds above the village are heavy with rain.

  I don’t eat much. I don’t like to cook and there’s nowhere to go out. You could make a pie or jam out of the huckleberries on the east slope of the Slocan Gorge, and sometimes I walk down to eat a handful for something to do. Huckleberries taste bitter and sweet at the same time and they have tough skins. This morning a flock of bushtits flitted in the bushes, eating them; cheeky, they scolded me when I got close and made me laugh.

  Some days there doesn’t seem to be a clear distinction between myself and the cabin and the cedars, especially the birds. I feel well when this place is in bloom and they are chattering in the bushes. Because there is never any hurry, because I can take my time, even the raggy towel I use to dry the dishes has become something like a living thing.

  Sometimes I feel people are like those dappled shadows you find under a summer peach or apricot tree, growing steadily and then fading as the light fades, say when a cloud passes over the sky. Then they grow bright again and they fade, not all at once, in their own time and when they show strong light they share their warmth and when they dim they’re afraid and often alone and there is no pattern to it and no ultimate reason.

  9

  At the end of the summer, Rose and I went into the village bar to phone about a room; she needed a place to stay for the winter when her baby would be born. Mr. Giacomo was sitting alone in one of the booths and he turned to watch us come in.

  Rose led him into the talk of his loss, her eyes shining and serene.

  “The baby was a tiny thing,” he said, weighed almost nothing in his hands. He had made the coffin, spent an afternoon in his workshop finishing something that was no bigger than a wooden shoe-box, with a cross that he’d carved in the ash wood lid. He worked the lid with some fine chisels he’d found on Shido Island, tempered and old, wanting the afternoon alone in his grief and in his fear of what might come next. “A blow close to home — to the heart,” he said, “for us to lose a child like that.” He was wearing fingerless gloves and he was gazing at his hands wrapped around a coffee cup that smelled strongly of grappa, his face worn and drawn.

  For the first time, Rose really looked at him. I had never seen her look so caring before. She’d overcome her shyness, which she usually expressed through laughter. It was unusual for her to be so quiet, and you never knew when she might turn what she heard into a joke, even a man’s grief. Maybe because she was going to be a mother herself, she looked touched by his story.

  She led him on in her quietness; he could have been talking to a mirror the way she looked at him, composed and quiet and touched his hand to listen. I wasn’t sure of her friendship then; sometimes when she talked with Ian Beruski or Danny Moyer, older boys, there was a sparkling brightness in her voice, and she laughed quickly and eagerly at their jokes, when she wanted them to like her.

  She brought Mr. Giacomo a plate of almonds from the bar. He hadn’t eaten since morning, up in the vineyards pulling leaves to expose the fruit to the weak sun, and he was drinking grappa and coffee to warm up, he said. In his café there would be food all day but here the kitchen didn’t open till five. When he looked at me his eyes were full of grief. He drained the cup, placed the taxi keys on the table. Rose helped him to his feet.

  “Where do you want to go?” she asked him.

  He said, “You girls drive anywhere you want.” He walked like he was wading in thigh-deep water and Rose supported his arm.

  “We’ll go down to Mrs. Hiraki’s, then, to look at a room she has for me.”

  She looked at me and smiled.

  I wouldn’t touch him. He smelled of coffee and grappa, and I was afraid that if I touched him he would fall over or crumple. Rose had trouble guiding his steps. She warned him about the raised threshold, worn oak. She had the patient voice of a nurse. When we were outside, he couldn’t button his sheepskin coat. She buttoned it for him.

  “This is a marvelous day,” he said, sniffing at the air, eyes shining. “You girls drive anywhere you want,” and he stretched out in the back seat. He rolled down a window. To clear his head, he said.

  Rose drove down main street, past the Giacomo café and the swept granite steps of the town hall. “I don’t have a license,” she announced and we looked at each other and laughed. We left town, went under some roadside willows in a hollow by a cattle pond, trees that were always the last to put out their leaves in spring and the last to lose them in the fall, and I could smell sap where an early frost had pried into the bark. Some Charlois were standing at a pasture fence, their dark eyes turned to the taxi and behind them a field of meadow grass that reached to the foothills.

  “What will you girls do,” he said from the back seat, “now that the summer is over?”

  I could hear him sit up, pull at his coat, his voice thick and gravelly. And I wondered, how do you get to talk like that, deliberate or knowing, I’m hardly confident in anything I say. I heard him ask what kind of place Rose was staying in, and already in his asking there was some kind of promise.

  “You’re staying in a summer trailer?” he asked. “There’s no heat in Michael Guzzo’s trailer on the Palliser. There’s no phone for when that baby of yours is due, no way to call.” And the promise in his tone was, Oh now, we’ll find something else for you soon enough.

  I was surprised he knew Rose was pregnant and so was she; she looked at me with widened eyes then shrugged. The curiosity of our village was always on the alert, and now we knew that talk had been going around about her.

  I thought about Mr. Giacomo’s offering to help her find a place. Oh we’ll help you find something soon enough, I murmured, trying to feel the weight of his words, find the feeling behind them.

  Rose drove in a startled manner, pulling the wheel to the right or left as if she felt we were drifting to the gravel shoulder or the yellow centre line. It felt like she didn’t trust her sense of distance. I’d seen her knock glasses and café spoons to the floor, reaching for them. Oh, she would cry in frustration, looking at the shattered glass on the café floor, why won’t things stand! She walked like a dancer, all of her weight carried in the small of her back, but when she sat at the small linoleum table in her cramped trailer, she bumped the centre pole with her knee, spilling things.

  “This is way too far down in the valley,” she kept saying. “I can’t live this far down!”

  “You don’t want to live way down here all by yourself,” Mr. Giacomo agreed from the back seat. “You need to be close to the village and the hospital.”

  She was looking at the farmhouses and the orchards with increasing worry, as if the farther we drove the more the fields and the vineyards she didn’t know made her feel alone and vulnerable.

 
I could have told her that Mrs. Hiraki’s was miles out of town, but I didn’t know that it would worry her so.

  In summer we often bought vegetables and eggs at Mrs. Hiraki’s farm. She would talk about the problems she was having, blighted tomatoes or rats in the pea crop. During our visits she talked just to keep us there a little longer, and she would show my father rows of withered leaves blackened with mould.

  “She’s lonely by herself,” my father told me once, driving back to the village. “And she’s having trouble managing.”

  Mrs. Hiraki was standing at the kitchen window when we drove into the yard, peering out. Rose parked under an old apple tree that had water wands rising out of its unpruned branches like the tines of a hayfork. Mr. Giacomo stayed behind in the taxi. “You girls go on in,” he said. “I’m comfortable here. I’ll just be in the way.”

  “They sell strong grappa in the village bar,” he went on. “If I get out of this taxi now, you’ll have to do my walking for me.”

  Mrs. Hiraki met us at the door. She took up Rose’s hands and patted them between hers. She led us upstairs, glancing at Rose with a wary look, a tremor in her lips.

  She showed Rose a room at the north end of the house under a sloped roof that made it feel small and cramped. She had washed the walls so that they gleamed and smelled of Lysol; under the single window there was an unpainted wooden table with a vase of dried flowers. The mattress creaked when Rose sat on it, on an iron frame that looked like it might have come from an internment shack in New Slocan. There was a porcelain basin where Rose could wash her hands and a tall wardrobe in one corner that just fit under the ceiling.

  “Thank you!” Rose said. “Thank you for showing me this room.” She gave me a quick, frightened look.

  “There’s more space here than in the trailer,” she admitted.

  Still, she couldn’t stay. Later she said a smell of cooking came through the floor grate, the kitchen was directly below. A lot of food smells made her sick in the morning. She hated the smell of miso soup and Mrs. Hiraki had been heating miso soup.

  We went downstairs, stood in the doorway to say goodbye. Rose couldn’t say no to the old woman’s staring, pleading look. You could tell that she hoped Rose would stay on, to help her with the farm, to keep her company. All Rose could say was, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  The wind was picking up on Olebar Road when we drove home.

  “When I find a place, will you help me to move?” she asked me. I knew she was only talking about a few boxes of clothes and books and some kitchen utensils.

  “We will help you,” I heard Mr. Giacomo say from the back seat. “My wife and I will help you get settled.” I felt that he was testing her, to see what her reaction would be, to see how much help she would accept. Something in his voice worried me, something I couldn’t make out then.

  “Maybe you could move into Mrs. Camozzi’s on 2nd Street,” I said. Mrs. Camozzi’s house had been built for the Stagliano family and now there was a sign in the window that said EIGHT BEDROOMS, and some trainmen stayed there, but maybe she didn’t board girls. The hotel on Columbia Avenue was a two-storey brick building with a veranda that ran all the way around it. Road crews used to stay there, but now the rooms were rented out to old people mostly.

  Why don’t you come and live with us Rose, I wanted to ask her, to give her an alternative to the Giacomo’s offer. We had two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a mudroom in the back, a tiny living room that we called the parlour in a place on 4th Street people called the miner’s cottage. Sometimes my father talked of building an addition but he never got around to it.

  In her fear of being alone that winter, Rose did most of the talking on the drive home and mostly about herself. Her hands on the wheel looked as delicate as a child’s, the skin under the nails a pale blue. Once, she leaned to peer through the windshield at apple bins at the side of the road, surprised to see them so late in the season.

  Mr. Giacomo said the apples in those bins wouldn’t ripen, that they were culls for the cider factory in Westbank and the jam factory in Sandon.

  “I’ll help you find a place,” I said, turning to her. “When I’m in town I’ll look after your baby for free when you get a job.”

  Mr. Giacomo said he could see the last of the fruit in the orchards, apples that the pickers had missed in filling their sacks to move on rather than climb for the one or two out of reach. His voice was gravelly, sleepy. It felt like he was talking just to stay awake.

  “Gleaners stay into October before going to Burton,” Rose said, “to cull what’s left. They stay in a drafty bunkhouse where you have to light a fire at night to keep warm, burn vine cuttings or peach wood.”

  I could tell that she was avoiding asking for his help and that he was waiting, quiet, letting his offer settle in with all this small talk about apples.

  “I don’t want to live downtown,” Rose said then. “I want a small place, with a sunny kitchen and a bath. I want a yard where I can plant a few flowers and grow some stuff. I want to make my own baby food and I want a porch where I can sit outside with him in the summer and nurse him without people looking. I want a plain wooden bed, not some old iron thing. And I want to be able to open the windows so the rooms smell fresh.”

  Her trailer had thin metal walls and an un-insulated floor. It had a propane heater under cupboards she’d painted red, but already that fall she could feel the chill of the floor through her slippers. The bed was the tabletop with the centre pole taken out and the top fixed between the bench seats so that it was like sleeping on a train bed, with your legs drawn in so that you could fit by the metal wall near your knees.

  The trailer she lived in was too small for a girl with a baby. Where would she put the crib?

  I couldn’t tell whether Mr. Giacomo in the back seat was asleep or listening.

  Now, driving back to town, I realized she was close to panic. I didn’t realize that not knowing where you’re going to live, that the prospect of a room like Mrs. Hiraki’s could scare a person so. An early snow was falling through the streetlights and the tires creaked down Columbia Avenue, making the sound of your hand in wet hair after a shampoo. Flakes swirled over the taxi. Rose’s hand darted out to snatch one from the air, to lick it from one of the wool mitts she’d put on because her hands were cold. She said that the mitt tasted of soap. There was hardly any traffic and all the store windows were dimmed. I could see tracks that horses had made and the fishtail track of a log that someone had towed to the Cowan St. Mill.

  Mr. Giacomo was asleep. That night it felt like we could take him anywhere or even leave him in the back seat and maybe he’d awake, startled or afraid of where he was. Nothing more I could do, not even a blanket to cover him with. He looked so small there, curled up and asleep, his hands pressed between his knees.

  “Where are we going to leave Mr. Giacomo?” Rose asked.

  She was driving cautiously down Columbia Avenue, turned up 4th Street, unsure of what to do. She left the car running in the street outside his house, hammered on the door, and when she heard approaching footsteps, ran laughing toward me, saying, “Let’s go!”

  10

  “You’re working too hard,” my father said. “Relax.”

  “Bend your knees and back. Get into a rhythm.”

  I was holding the two mould handles attached to the deckle; I scooped some milky water from the vat to send a wave across the mould that jumped off the far side.

  “Let me show you.” He was only using his fingertips to hold the handles. “Let the rigging carry the weight. If you lift it and force it, you’ll be exhausted in four sheets.”

  I gritted my teeth and tried and tried but I couldn’t make the even waves or splashes.

  I’d spent all morning watching him, the relaxed rolling of the stock across the bamboo mesh in the paper mould, arms, legs and back bent, body bouncing and nodding with the mould and splashing stock.

  “Be loose. Be gentle. You have to roll and work with the bounce
. Stop forcing it.” I laughed. He was using the voice of Mr. Hiraki to instruct me, bits of paper fibre on his apron, in his black hair, on the window over the vat.

  When I watched him, there was never a pause or a dead moment in the forming of a sheet.

  Every fall my father drives about three hours from here to an abandoned goat farm in the Illecillewaet Valley, to bring out truckloads of mulberry branches. Someone had tried to grow mulberries in there, to feed to goats. He steams the branches, to strip the white inner bark that he pins under large stones behind a weir in the Palliser River, strands as long as a girl’s hair. From a truckload he gets twenty pounds of bark that he makes into paper so precious that it’s sold in the art markets of New York and Montreal, to watercolour artists and printmakers. His paper has almost no smell and it has the sheen of new snow.

  After the paper-making lesson, I went with him to help draw that bark out of the river.

  We took it into the Illecillewaet snowfields for snow bleaching. The snowfields were retreating. When I was younger, I could walk to them. Now we drove.

  We spread the bark in thin layers on the snow, covering it with snow. Every day for several days we’d drive up there to turn the bark over.

  He looked the fibre over carefully for flecks of black bark. Sound carried far up there and from way below I could hear the scree of a merlin hunting in the pines. Above us in the bright light the sky was almost black in the saddle between two peaks.

  I loved watching my father then. The fibre was new and held many possibilities. Who knew what kind of sheets it would make? It was healthy and strong and slowly bleaching in the snow and he handled the fibres carefully, spreading them over his palm as he turned them.

  “Why is your mother spending so much time with Rose?” he asked me.