“All right,” I heard Rose say. “All right then. I can’t do this on my own. I’m too scared.”
“Thank you for helping me,” she said to me. “Thank you! We’re going back.”
When I crawled under the blanket to hold Mrs. Giacomo after her baby died, I felt how icy cold she was, shivering, and now that cold grief flared through me.
Now, when anyone touches me, I pull away without thinking. Have you ever felt that way? It comes to me like a spark of static electricity, as when you barefoot it across a carpet on a dry morning and touch a door handle.
In the winter of ’69, a few months after Rose met Michael Guzzo, I saw him in the Starlight Theatre.
In those days, my mother bought theatre tickets so she could sleep in the theatre. We’d go up the side aisle to where there was hardly anyone and wrap ourselves in blankets. She said she slept best in places where sleep surprised her, in the depot waiting for the bus to Naramata, on trains or in farm trucks returning home after a birth, jarring down the valley roads with a towel bunched on the rocker panel for a pillow, sleeping while the sun climbed over Odin Mountain, a dusty, rosy light flaring over the windshield. She slept a dreamless sleep and she awoke reluctantly, touching her dry lips and rubbing her eyes, looking around in all innocence or startled by where she was. Till all the worries rushed in, she briefly looked young and she had all the mussy-haired sleepiness of a little girl. Then she’d remember the Giacomo baby’s death, but there was a moment or two when she didn’t remember and I imagine the world was as it was, the flare of light on the Illecillewaet snowfields through the truck window, the long face of Cary Grant on the screen, the Palliser Valley orchards spreading by the bus window, and she was momentarily okay.
One night we were sitting below the prow, a little raised platform in the theatre where the sawmill crew usually sat. Michael Guzzo had come in. My mother was asleep and I watched him take short steps down the aisle, feeling his way in the blinding screen light, turning to look over us. He smelled of cedar sawdust, and the sawmill crew called out as he went past,
Keep your head down, Guzzo, we can’t see!
Where’s Rose?
Is she here?
He raised an embarrassed hand to brush away their laughter and to shield his eyes.
Yes, she was here somewhere.
They were showing North by Northwest and in the light of Mount Rushmore’s face and Cary Grant’s frantic running, I saw Rose reach up to take his hand and I heard her whisper:
It’s you!
She took his hand to draw him down, and he put an arm around her to muss her hair.
I felt jealous then, watching how they sat so close together, and I wondered whether a boy would ever hold me like that.
How did he go from her life?
That winter he was only in town to earn money to travel. His uncle, almost blind and no longer able to work, had bought an interest in the Odin Mill. They had hired him as a family obligation, though he turned out to be a good worker, reliable, and even when they were cutting edge grain cedar for the Vancouver boatyards, he showed up for work, forearms bandaged because the oil in the dust raised welts on his skin.
Rose told me that he’d left to travel in Central America before she even knew she was pregnant.
The mill was going to shut down because of the coming snows, and he couldn’t see sitting out the winter idle. He promised her that he’d be back in the spring, when the boss said they’d be rehiring.
Why are you going, Rose had asked him. They were sitting together on the narrow, cushioned seat by the linoleum table in his trailer on the Palliser, and she’d drawn away to look at him carefully.
She could see that this wasn’t the whole truth. There was a sadness in him that she couldn’t touch or hold or lessen, and it confused her.
He told her that he’d been drifting since his family had lost their land, their village, that he couldn’t find a place to settle down in.
But you are coming back?
Yes, he reassured her.
There was a lake in Central America he wanted to see, in a volcanic crater where the Maya said clouds were born. Once in the Grizzly Bookstore he’d shown me a photo of it: there was a lone fisherman on a shore of pumice stones; bundles of sticks with ribbons tied to them showed against the water, and the sides of the crater, covered in pines, rose steeply all around. He had found this photo in a book at the back of the store, among the secondhand volumes he called train books.
What’s so special about a lake? I asked him.
He closed the book then, touched its cover, a childlike, fragile look in his eyes that I felt drawn to.
Who knows what I’ll find there? he said with a smile.
A sacred lake that he wanted to see. Have you ever felt that, amazed at what people do? That the wanting was enough for him to go? What are “wants”? And do they really matter that much, “I want this” and “I want that” and therefore I shall go? Doesn’t it get a bit tiring after a while, wanting things? Don’t you get worn out? What if you didn’t want anything at all, what would happen to you then?
14
This morning I weeded the herb beds, painted the outhouse. I got a call from a lookout in the Asher Valley and went out on the catwalk to watch a narrow, boiling mass of clouds send bolts, some of them visible for seconds, into the ridge at my feet. I could hear the electricity zinging around the aluminum eavestroughs, crackling and sparking. Curtains of virga swept across Leon Creek.
Because maybe the cabin would be hit by lightning I knelt trembling on a stool with glass insulators in the bottom of the legs. Helicopters were in the air to the south, tracking three fires that I’d spotted. Every time I finished taking a bearing from the fire finder I’d look up to see another tree explode into flames before I could finish filling out the last message.
Later this evening, the unmistakable smell of wood smoke. I sat up in bed to look north and made out in moonlight a column rising straight up, thick with burning fir or pine pitch.
Because it was night, no one could be flown in to that fire in the Bremmer Valley. The road in was switchbacks through canyons, so it would take three or four hours to drive to the scene. High, strong winds, I write in the log book.
In the Bremmer Valley, there’s a wet hollow of alder saplings. I don’t know how they got in there. The valley is narrow and dark and only gets a couple of afternoon hours of light. A raw wind must have carried in alder seeds, all at once, so that a field of them grew young and springy, their trunks no thicker than my thumb. Someone had tried to farm in there once, leaving only a fence line of rotten cedar posts grassed over, a scattering of lichen-covered apple trees that looked crouched and huddled in themselves, like cats moved into a new house, and a hollow for a root cellar.
A few weeks before Senna was born, I walked from the fire tower to the Bremmer Valley, to lay out an armful of alder saplings to dry in the field among the apple trees, shaking the soppy earth that was full of shale from their roots. A week later I took in a saw to cut off the root balls and I stripped the canes of withered leaves, carried them back to the cabin to weave into a crib. I wasn’t sure it would ever be used but I wanted it just in case Rose needed me to take him. I’d offered to help her and I wanted to be sure I could. I laid in towels for bedding in a frilled pillowcase and tied to the side a mobile of painted pinecones that I knew would make her laugh, so that he’d have something to look at. I even made rockers out of bent saplings tied with fishing line and I placed it under the north window and moved my little collection of books to the east sill. Those were warm days, maybe the last of the season, and the fireweed was in second bloom along the Palliser Ridge. When I sat out on the catwalk for hours, it felt like midsummer and I could smell the heat in the cedar siding, waiting.
Whole days and nights went by, billowed in time, and I didn’t know what was happening to her.
Now I see headlights on the dust roads, crews driving in to take out weekend campers and river runners. By
now the fire is in the pine and fir, trees torching off like matchsticks on the slopes of Bremmer Mountain. Burning debris tumbles and ignites more fires across the Palliser Ridge.
Later this morning a cold front is supposed to move in, bringing sleet and rain.
15
When I had a few days off, a month or so after we returned on the train, I went down from the fire tower to see Rose in her new apartment and to serve at the parish supper. It was hard to see her, after her decision to return. She always looked tired, as if she wasn’t sleeping well, worn and quiet.
Though she had her own place now, though she was still in our village, every day she grew more distant, more unreachable.
Yet when I asked her how she was, she’d say, Fine! and look at me defiantly.
It grieved me to be around her. All the lightheartedness had gone out of her step; she no longer laughed in that quick, bright way that made you feel good. Another time when I was in town I didn’t even go see her. I told myself I was too busy.
On the first morning of preparations for the parish supper, I got up early because my mother was up: I could hear her in the kitchen. She was making toast and coffee though it was still dark outside and the birds were asleep. She was dressed as I’ve never seen her before, in loose, light blue cotton slacks and a plain blue blouse. She looked younger.
“Where are you going?” I asked, wondering at the brightness in her eyes. All the worry had gone from her face. Though she was no longer dressed as a midwife, I asked, half-asleep, confused, “Is someone having a baby?”
I looked around for her midwife’s bag that she usually put on the kitchen table to check through before leaving.
“I’ve given that up,” she said. “I’ve another job.” And in my astonished silence, she added, “Cleaning rooms in the Mackenzie Hotel.”
I’d never seen her smile like that. She looked wide-awake, as if she’d just come from a swim in the lake. She was making herself a bag lunch, slicing bread and laying lettuce and sliced tomatoes and shredded ham on it, her hands light and quick. She took a couple of apples out of the refrigerator and a handful of raisins. These she put in a paper bag and she took a thermos of tea.
In her old job, she never had time to make food to take with her. When the call came, she would just get up, check the contents of her bag and go. Usually the family would feed her. Now she had time to sit and drink coffee before she went to work. She got up early, to sit at the kitchen table and listen to the awakening birds. Sometimes, she told me, she even read a newspaper or listened to the radio. There was no hurry, no emergency.
She called her new job — cleaning toilets, she said: “I clean toilets in the Mackenzie Hotel”— the work of nonemergencies. She had no disasters to anticipate. No one was turning to her, full of pain, with a look that said, You’re the only one here who knows what to do. Do something.
Lunch bag in hand, she said Mr. Giacomo had called to ask me to meet him by the river.
“He wants you to show him where to fish,” she said. “For the parish supper.”
On the Palliser banks, he asked me, “Do you think we’ll have any luck?”
I said I didn’t know.
We left the shore in his boat. I knew the deep pools under the bridge, where the sturgeon sleep like old dogs.
I remembered how he’d tried to touch my knee on the train and how my body had drawn away from him without even thinking. I didn’t feel that I was myself around him anymore. It slowly settled in me that I was afraid of him. His smile was calm and inviting, the friendliest thing about him, but it made me afraid.
The metal line he let out had thread woven over it the colour of the shadows that flowed along the river bottom. The tip of his fishing rod was as thick as his thumb. The river was littered with alder leaves, so many coloured with a blue bloom, like ripe plums.
I counted eight boats on the sturgeon pool under the bridge. Every year at this time the village fished the river. By agreement only one sturgeon was taken, and it was offered to the priest.
“Since the death of our boy,” he said, “my wife and me are like old people.” He laughed. “We must look like we’re cut out of cardboard! I believe people here see us that way,” touching the corners of his eyes. When he looked at me his eyes were full of shame.
“Mrs. Giacomo hasn’t left her room for weeks. Do you think Rose is going to keep her child? It must be so hard for her.”
His face showed the same quiet patience that I’d seen on the train.
The sky had settled over the river and already a few flakes were falling; almost like night the way the light had faded, the snow beginning to cling to the sandbar. The jacket he handed me smelled of wood smoke, of the campfires the village had lit on the sandbar while we fished for the new priest and of the gasoline he’d poured into the outboard motor tank. He draped the jacket over my knees with raw hands touched by the cold, his knuckles swollen. He was massaging his knuckles and I wanted to give him my mitts but he said no, he was fine.
“Of course she’s going to keep the baby,” I said then. I’d put on a look of complete confidence. “Your helping her isn’t going to make any difference.”
For a while he looked at me quietly. “Well that’s it, then,” he said. “I guess there’s nothing more I can do.”
He looked at me again and in his eyes there were still flashes of hope. “Rose has changed her mind before,” he said. “Maybe she’ll change it again.”
In the stern at his feet there were paper lanterns with cutouts pasted to them: horses and stars, half-moons, birds. Those were lanterns for the parish supper. Mr. Giacomo had brought them along for me to repair. I reglued the curled arms of foil stars, horses’ heads, crumpled birds’ wings that the Grade Twos had made from construction paper, fingertips numb in the river wind that came up in the morning.
He asked me if we should pull up our lines to try another pool, but I didn’t know for sure, and briefly his face looked sad. He couldn’t fish in one place for fear the fish might be caught in another. I really don’t know the river that well: a lot of easy and broken water, light and dark places.
He touched the corners of his eyes. His face was almost grey in the cold mist rising from the river.
I thought about what he’d said: about how he thought people in the village saw him and his wife in their grief. Like old, used-up people, he’d said, like cardboard cutouts. And he wanted a place of honour in our village. He’d always wanted to be among the best people, to fit in that way. Yet his wealth had not been enough to guarantee the health of his family, the respect of our village.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him then. “It can’t be helped.”
It was not Mr. Giacomo’s boat that caught the priest’s fish. Mr. Beruski caught it. Early afternoon, by way of a gaff-hook in its jaw, Mr. Beruski pulled the sturgeon onto the sandbar. It was lying on its side, gasping, and I covered its black eye with my hand.
“Over one hundred pounds,” said Mr. Giacomo. He walked its length, prodding its belly full of roe, a disappointed look on his face.
Sometimes I look for a change in my luck too. The morning before I came down from the fire tower, I saw three crows fly by the north window, each making the point of a triangle and I said to myself that’s a sign things are going to get better for my friend Rose. I was that desperate for encouragement.
Later that afternoon, pulling handfuls of soppy rotten leaves from the rain gutters on our house, I saw my mother hurry across the street. She’d been working at the hotel, lost track of time, and wanted to be home waiting for my father who was down at his one vat mill. On the ladder I saw what she hadn’t noticed — that he, too, was in the street. He had stepped behind a transport truck so that she wouldn’t see him under the street light that had just come on. This was a new game that they played, the waiting for each other. For the pleasure of seeing you. If she had slipped and fallen in the icy street he would have run to her. Her new life of nonemergencies was making her happy again, and
so he was happy.
16
Four men carried the fish to the priest. With the sturgeon wrapped in a black tarp, they stood at the church doors. They had brought it up a river path, then along 3rd Street to the church. Although Mr. Giacomo was at the head walking with Rose in her waitress outfit, the others did not allow him to carry any of the weight. He might as well have been carrying air. He pretended for the onlookers, but his arms were slack. I saw this, standing on the corner of 3rd Street and Columbia Avenue.
In our village, when people make up their mind that you’re generally more trouble than you’re worth, the hints at first are often subtle. There was this drifter who took a job on the green chain at the Odin Mill. Things started to go missing: gloves, work boots, a sandwich from a lunchpail. One day he sat down at the lunch table to pour tea from his thermos. He filled his cup with bunker oil. No one said anything, the whole crew was there at the lunch table, watching. He quit within the week, took his pay and left.
People could see what was happening with Rose, I wasn’t the only one. People could see how worn and tired she’d become, that a wall had been put up around her.
Earlier, in her room above the café, I’d brought Rose the rust-coloured paper raincoat I’d found in the Grizzly Bookstore. I told her that the procession was about to start and that Mr. Giacomo was waiting for her by the river. I said she could wear the paper raincoat in the procession. On an unpainted wooden table there were roadside cornflowers in a slender vase, their leaves curled and withered. She had changed into her waitress clothes to go to work in the Giacomo café and was combing out her hair that clung to the brush with static.
Along the sill, light played on small pieces of driftwood she’d collected. On one she’d painted, bright blue, the eye of a fish because it looked like a fish and on another she’d painted a horse’s mane. She’d sanded the pieces and polished them with beeswax. Light spilled over them as the shine spilled on her combed hair. After I picked one up, my hand smelled faintly of honey.
House of Spells Page 7
