She said, “Early in the morning before shift we go along the river to find new pieces he can play with. I like to make my own things for him.”
“I couldn’t see myself in Field,” she said. “I felt scared thinking about it. Mr. Giacomo is nice enough, as long as I go along with what he says. If I don’t he gets mad.”
She had no dresser, so her clothes were carefully folded in the two open suitcases she had taken on the train to Field. The baby’s clothes were stored in bins under the secondhand crib my mother had bought for her, and he was asleep in there. Because the apartment was above the café, she only had to walk downstairs to work, and she would call the bar telephone and leave hers off the hook so that she could hear his cries should he awake while she was working. She hadn’t put up curtains because she didn’t know how long she would be there. After shift she’d carry up a plate of leftovers to make baby food — whirred squash or peas and pabulum — in a blender that she’d take apart and leave to clean in the sink. There was no music or radio and all you could hear was the traffic in Columbia Avenue or the crackle of the frost melting on the east windows when the sun came up over the alley at midmorning; she had a towel bunched there to collect the dripping water.
The place filled me with silence, the silence of waiting and of being unsure of yourself. It made me feel quiet and expectant and I didn’t know what I was waiting for. Even the creak of the floorboards sounded loud and edgy, maybe because there was hardly any furniture and the echoing ceiling sloped on two sides to join the walls at shoulder height.
I’d bought the paper raincoat for her, thinking she’d like to wear it, but she laughed and said no, turning down my gift.
She held the raincoat up to herself to check the fit; it had the luminescence of corn snow. It had been waterproofed with persimmon tannin.
“No,” she said again, stroking out a sleeve to flatten it along her arm. “Honey I don’t think so. Mr. Giacomo won’t like it. He wants me to show up in my waitress things, to represent the café.”
“Why don’t you wear it?” she asked.
I thought that she would have been bold enough to wear it in the procession, to stand up to him, but I was wrong. Her laughter had sounded sharp and false.
“Do you like this place?” I asked her.
Now she looked at me thoughtfully. She picked up her brush and wrinkled her brow.
“You’re my friend, right?”
“Yes, Rose,” I nodded.
“No, I don’t like this place. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Why not?”
“It doesn’t feel like my home. I always feel we’re being watched. I can’t go anywhere without Mr. Giacomo asking, Where are you going? When will you be back? I try to pretend that we’re okay but we’re not.”
At that moment she had lost her defiant, determined look. It no longer felt like she was pushing me away, and I could see how lonely and vulnerable she had become. I felt then that I could help her, and a memory came to me.
“Do you remember the night we went wading in the lake in the snow, when that house came out of the mist?”
She nodded, smiling.
“And Mr. Giacomo in the window?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember how anxious and worried he sounded when he called out to us, Who’s there? Can’t you hear Mr. Giacomo saying to your boy, ‘Where are you going? When will you be back?’ while he grows up in that Burton house? And where will you be?”
“Why is he that way?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel he’s always trying to hide something.”
She was sitting at the table by the window, the hairbrush in her hand. I bent down and gave her a kiss.
17
Each year I have to climb farther, a little farther, a few hundred yards or so, to bury my father’s paper in the snowfields. Everywhere there is reflected light.
The morning of the parish supper, before I loaded the truck to drive up to the snowfields, my father laid out a two-by-three-foot sheet on his work table. You could see the impression of the grain of the yew wood drying board on it, under a powder snow luster. It smelled like straw.
Lacey, he said to me, running his hand over it, not one flaw, not one impurity. It’s like a new human soul.
I drove up to the snowfields to lay out the paper and cover it with snow. Those sheets were translucent and they had a fine satiny sheen. Because of their purity, they’d last maybe hundreds of years. They were so strong you could pass them through a finger ring and they wouldn’t shred.
They would outlast me.
I thought of all those trout I caught when I was ten years old. I knew the ones on the outside of the pile were already dead: all the light had gone out of their eyes. No light, no life.
When I got back to town, I went to look for Rose in the Giacomo café. She was disinfecting the kitchen counter where the fish would be prepared; her hands and arms, flushed to the elbows, smelled of bleach. Mr. Giacomo asked me to help him carry glass panes and the winter door up from the café cellar. We unhinged the sidewalk shutters, unscrewed the hinges from the cedar sash and fitted in winter storm panes and the pine wood door. Watching us, some passersby stood for a moment under the awning, under a darkening sky.
All the storefronts were lit up and the sky had turned a dark grey. Trees on the mountain stirred. In the café washroom, I folded and rolled an evening’s fresh towels and placed them in the V-shaped rack by the sink.
When I came into the dining room, Rose was standing by the bar.
“I’m going back to the Big Bend to live with my parents,” she announced.
“Oh, you’ll not be leaving,” Mr. Giacomo said and he touched her ducked head, laughing and smiling at me. “This is where you belong.”
I couldn’t imagine Mr. Giacomo touching me like that; it just seemed impossible that you’d allow him to touch you.
All of a sudden I felt very tired, and I went to sit in a chair by the window. It smelled of varnish because Mr. Giacomo had varnished the sill. I was wearing a loose-knit sweater that I’d bought in the Grizzly Bookstore. It felt like the weight of an extra blanket, because in one pocket there was a folded page torn from a book and in the other a Japanese bowl.
Rose came up behind me, to drape her arms over my shoulders. I couldn’t see her eyes and I couldn’t imagine the expression in them. I could feel the light weight of her forearms on my shoulders, the stillness of her gaze. I could see the freckles on the back of her hands and on her wrists that smelled of bleach. Under her resting arms I felt like a bundle of tense sticks.
To free myself, I leaned forward to rest my fingertips on the sill. The varnish gripped my fingertips when I touched it, like frost on a metal door handle.
I went over to Mr. Giacomo’s table, and I laid out before him the book page from my pocket and the Japanese bowl. He stared at them, and then at me.
I should say how I got that bowl.
I’d heard that work had stopped on the Burton house, and I went there that afternoon to see Mrs. Giacomo. I’d been wondering how she was. I’d brought a book with me that I wanted to show her. It’s called A Catalogue of Unrecovered Items, Volume Four: Pottery and Clay Figurines, a train book that Michael Guzzo had bought in the Grizzly Bookstore. It was published by the Allied Powers after the war. In the introduction it says that the catalogued items, some of them identified by insurance photographs, were never recovered during the occupation of Japan, and the purpose of the catalogue, in several volumes, was to pass on the work of recovery to future generations.
The kitchen was still filled with unpacked boxes, the green cushion from the sofa in the downstairs hallway was still on her bed. I could hear the garden hose dripping in the kitchen sink. I ran my hand along the plaster walls, smooth as a yew wood drying board. They gave off a soft glow and they smelled like chalk. There were footprints up and down the hallway in the plaster dust, some of them my own. The propane heaters stood collected at the doorway. The ca
mp stove still had a pot on it, a thin skin of dust on the bottom of the pot. The two clay bowls that Mr. Giacomo wanted to drink from in celebration were still on the counter. I leafed through the book, found the photo I was looking for. Those bowls were from the Tokugawa period, just as Mr. Giacomo had said, the potter’s mark incised in the base. His wealth hadn’t come from logging in the Nachako country. His wealth had come from artifacts he’d stolen at the end of the war. He had worked as a translator on Shido Island and used his knowledge to profit from the war.
I hated him then. I hated his lies, the sham way he’d gone about making a place for himself in our life. I hated him and Mrs. Giacomo, too, for the way they were trying to wall Rose in with their grief.
I pocketed one of those bowls. I stayed for an hour or so, lit candles that sputtered and crackled. I looked through Mrs. Giacomo’s dresser drawers for her clothes and I looked under the foyer bench for any sign of recently worn shoes. I found out later she had left, maybe soon after the birth, moved back to their house on 4th Street, where she stayed alone in her room.
Now I placed the bowl very tenderly, gently before him, quietly, like in the stillness when the hawk comes. I smoothed out the page with the photograph on it as though it were a precious sheet, pure washi. I felt that something inside me was just about to break.
I didn’t want him to have the whole book, just that page. Maybe he had other things that were in that book. But I only knew about the bowls, so that was all I could accuse him of.
The crinkles at his eyes deepened and paled, but he smiled.
“So you know,” he said, and I nodded.
“They had lost the war,” he smiled, “the ones we interrogated. The crown prince, the naval officers. We only took from them what they’d already stolen during their retreat.”
He paused, and a shadow drew into his eyes.
“That happened so long ago,” he said, a softness in his voice. “It’s not something I think about often.”
I started yelling at him then. I told him not to waste his confident smile on me. It might look like he was trying to help Rose, but he was just hemming her in with his deceit. And nothing he had to offer was worth one touch of her freckled hands, one moment of her dancer’s grace.
Just then Rose came out of the kitchen. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing!” and he quickly balled up the sheet and pocketed it, put the bowl on a glass shelf behind the bar, by the upturned wineglasses.
That was the last time I spoke to Mr. Giacomo.
I left, didn’t stay for the parish supper. I was shaking, exhausted, and yet I felt a kind of joy. I walked down our main street towards the tracks, hating his complacent smile, hating the fact that he didn’t seem to care about what I felt. He was going to have his family his own way, at whatever the cost. But I wasn’t going to let him.
What if Michael Guzzo found out that he was a father? With all the loss that he’d had in his life, maybe this was one loss he wouldn’t allow to happen, pushed out of the life of his son. Maybe it would be important for him to say to the Giacomos, Enough, this you can’t take from me.
18
Yesterday, when I got back to the fire tower from my days off, I brought along the ticket I’d bought to Guatemala City. I knew that Michael Guzzo was somewhere in Guatemala. The photo that he’d shown me was of a sacred lake in the district of Quetzaltenango, in the western highlands of that country. I’d decided to go find him.
As soon as I got in the door I saw that the cabin was not as I’d left it: my bed had been pushed to the north wall, the chrome-legged chairs had been moved from the east to the west window, my basil plants shuffled along the banister, the cutlery switched in the hutch, the stacked dishes pushed back on the counter. Nothing was where it was and I felt terrified, as if this place were not mine, as if I’d lost my life.
One book was missing from my collection on the east sill, the Catalogue of Unrecovered Items.
Just at dawn, the sound of dripping water. Everywhere I could hear melting snow. Today the cabin is to be boarded up for the winter, plywood nailed over glass, the doors locked. Through the window by my bed, I see snow water flowing over frost on a rock outcrop that looks like strands of a girl’s hair. Lightning storms that used to sweep through this valley go on the other side of the foothills. Now I see smoke from campfires on Olebar Lake.
Below, in the village, people are turning on their breakfast lights.
The logging fires are still smouldering on the Palliser Ridge, a white, drifting smoke that reminds me of washi paper.
When I applied for this job, the Forestry Service questioned my young age, my ability to be alone. That age and loneliness go together is not questioned.
When I was younger, I was more sure of myself, and now I feel porous, less contained, like a sheet of my father’s washi. I go out of here in dreams and when I nod off I sometimes can’t tell the difference between dream and memory and when I awake I look on myself as a stranger.
There is a squirrel sleeping in the wall; during the day it raids the bird feeders.
The pines below the ridge are singing. I can smell the resin in the swaying trunks. Last night’s stars have a scoured midwinter sharpness. Outside the west window, one last star shows its grape petal rays.
There really are so many ways to be a little more gentle in this world.
Acknowledgements
EXCERPTS FROM THIS NOVEL HAVE BEEN PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN Writing Beyond History (MONTREAL: CUSMANO COMMUNICATIONS, 2006) AND AS A CHAPBOOK ENTITLED Mio Zio (TORONTO: FLAT SINGLES PRESS, 1999) .
FOR THEIR ENDURING SUPPORT AND FRIENDSHIP, MANY THANKS TO ANNA, DEANE, REBEKAH, LAURIE, DREW, CHERYL, DAVE, CHRISTIE AND FLOYD. THANKS ALSO TO MARILYN BOWERING, STEVEN GALLOWAY, EDNA ALFORD, MARY WOOD, AND ESPECIALLY TO PAUL MATWYCHUK, ANDREW WILMOT AND NATALIE OLSEN AT NEWEST PRESS.
THE AUTHOR EXPRESSES HIS DEEPEST GRATITUDE TO TOM WHARTON, EDITOR AT NEWEST, FOR HIS CAREFUL READING OF THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT AND FOR HIS ENTHUSIASTIC SUPPORT OF The Wheel Keeper PROJECT.
THANKS ALSO TO VANCOUVER ISLAND UNIVERSITY AND TO THE BANFF CENTRE’S WRITING STUDIO FOR THE TIME AND PLACE TO COMPLETE AN EARLY DRAFT OF THE MANUSCRIPT.
ROBERT PEPPER-SMITH LIVES ON A FARM IN THE CINNABAR VALLEY WITH HIS LOVE ANNA AND TEACHES PHILOSOPHY AT VANCOUVER ISLAND UNIVERSITY. HE IS AT WORK ON THE THIRD NOVEL IN THE WHEEL KEEPER SERIES, TENTATIVELY ENTITLED Lake of Memory.
THIS BOOK WAS TYPESET IN CENTAUR, RELEASED BY MONOTYPE.
THE ENDSHEETS ARE PRINTED ON DOMTAR COLORS 20-LB CHAMOIS.
THE TEXT PAPER IS 55-LB ROLLAND ENVIRO 100 NATURAL.
House of Spells Page 8
