Boy Lost in Wild

by Brenda Hasiuk

  When Albert knocks and leaves the grocery bags in the hallway, I am not even insulted.

  “Gotta go, man.” He waves over his shoulder. “Enjoy.”

  All afternoon, I chop. Celery and water chestnuts, cauliflower and cashews—none are spared the blade. I work around the precarious mountain of dishes, letting no obstacle get in my way. I think of Kyla, how she spoke to me in a charming combination of broken Mandarin, English, and pantomime, made me laugh until it hurt unbearably with tales of her return to Guangzhou province. Pretty much everyone stared, and some came right up, took my hand, took my white mother’s hand. It was nice, but a little like being the main attraction at a petting zoo. Down the Yangtze, it was as beautiful as I imagined, but my stomach was off so I hurled, snapped a photo, hurled, snapped a photo. Many of the women were so gorgeous, so stylish, but what I loved was that they picked their noses anywhere, anytime! On the bus, on the street, they daintily hold up their newspaper as if no one can see them digging around in there like they’re looking for diamonds.

  Such an enticing girl, this Kyla, who is so Chinese, but so not. It’s no wonder the grannies on the street couldn’t resist coming over to have a little poke just to see if she was real. I’m volunteering at the hospital because I’ve been given so much, and I want to give back. And the best schools like that kind of stuff. And it’s good to practise my Mandarin, because it’s rustier than my French. My one indulgence is those awful vampire novels. I think they literally feed on the sick romantic in all of us. It’s as if one could spend a lifetime exploring her mysteries, and my littered kitchen counter becomes a rainbow of sugar peas and baby carrots, pink shrimp and yellow pepper. How long has it been since I’ve eaten such riches? Two weeks, two months, two years? My dad is more of a Mediterranean guy, but I thought the cuisine of Guangzhou was incredible. How can the Chinese be so skinny and so obsessed with food? I think I got sick because I couldn’t stop eating. The sizzle of oil in the pan, the grassy smell of bok choy hitting the heat, makes me so homesick I could cry.

  There is knocking at the door and my father interrupts the charming Kyla. The blubbering must come to an end, son. Don’t let us down now.

  It’s Albert. “Can I come in?”

  I am on the verge of tears but I swallow them down like foul medicine. He sinks down in Officer Blondie’s seat and looks around as if it’s his first visit. “Smells good.”

  I don’t trust myself to speak, so only smile.

  “Just thought you’d like to know,” he says. “The lady downstairs, she was off her meds. I went and talked to her and she seemed fine, and the apartment next door’s empty until the end of the month. But they left me this phone number for her worker, and he went and took her to the psych ward.”

  “Meds?” I ask.

  “Medicine,” he says. “She had medicine to control stuff like the screaming, but then she didn’t take it. That’s why you heard her.”

  “They take her to hospital?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Same one as you. This block is a gong show.”

  Kyla told me that China is the only place on earth where more women kill themselves than men. The poison of choice is agricultural fertilizer. Perhaps they all wish they’d been abandoned at the market.

  “Please,” I say. “You join me for food?”

  He clasps his giant hands behind his head, and his beefy, muscled arms are impressive. This is a people who don’t need fancy martial arts to stand a chance. He would be a good match for Officer Blondie. “Nah, I just ate,” he says.

  But I am so filled with relief that I’m not crazy, so full of hope for the first time in how long—two weeks, two months, two years?—that I cannot bear to be alone. “Please, yes. I made much.”

  I don’t give him a chance to resist. I go to the kitchen, scrub out some bowls, fill them heaping with my afternoon’s labours. My knee throbs but I pay it no heed, proceed to lay out the feast on the low, build-it-yourself, Chinese-manufactured table that came with the apartment. In Canada, they call it a coffee table. I place a plate and fork in front of Albert. “Dig in,” I say.

  He laughs, and for a few minutes, there is silence. I eat like a man who’s been on the verge of eating his dead seatmate after a plane crash. The chopsticks can’t reach my lips fast enough.

  “It’s good,” Albert says. “You’re a good cook, Chow.”

  I nod. “Chinese like their food.”

  We concentrate on eating some more.

  “It’s funny,” Albert says. “I used to watch all those kung fu movies and I kind of wanted to go there. They always had those misty mountains and really tall, bendy trees.”

  “Bamboo,” I say. “Bamboo bends easily in wind.”

  Albert pushes his plate away, laughs, resumes his strong-man pose. “Christ, I wasn’t even hungry, man.”

  I smile, wonder if I will be sick like Kyla, feasting so well after such a long fast. But I cannot stop, will not stop, because it is a new dawn.

  “You know, Chow,” Albert says, “you should feel good. You maybe saved that woman. She was in real trouble there.”

  I nod. But I don’t feel good. I feel unafraid, and I look hard at Albert the ball-playing caretaker, because it’s as if for the first time, I am observing a truly good man. He is not trying to be stoic or clever or brave or loyal. He is not trying to be anything. He is simply good.

  And I think of this picturesque Chinese countryside in the movies. I’m sure Kyla would not believe it, but she has almost certainly seen more of rural China than I. My ancestors have been city people for generations and are not ones to holiday. Only a handful of times have I experienced this countryside of the stories and tourists.

  But once, on a school field trip to some temple I can no longer name, the view took my breath away. It was early morning on the bus, all of us students still sleepy, and a mist hung over the rolling rice paddies. As we travelled, it was if the noise and towers of the city were wiped clean with a brushstroke, only to reveal a soft dream of static clouds and slow-flowing waters. And I suddenly want to take Kyla there, to this silly, fleeting dreamland of my boyhood, proudly introduce her to my loving parents despite her broad shoulders and lowly lineage.

  “Hey, Chow, you drifting on me?”

  I smile. “I have eaten too much.”

  But really, that isn’t it at all. For perhaps it’s not true that the Chinese are not romantics. Perhaps I am simply the first one in my family.

  It’s Me, Tatia

  Five Facts

  That Weren’t Generally Taught

  in Canadian Schools

  until the 21st Century

  1. For six weeks in the summer of 1919, the city of Winnipeg was crippled by a massive general strike. Frustrated by unemployment, inflation, and poor working conditions, factory workers, police officers, retail clerks, telephone operators, fire fighters—pretty much all those employed by business or government—joined forces to shut down services.

  2. On June 21, 1919, which came to be known as Winnipeg’s Bloody Saturday, strikers pushed over and set fire to a streetcar. The Royal North-West Mounted Police attacked the crowd of strike supporters gathered outside city hall, killing two and injuring 30. They followed the crowd as it dispersed through the streets, beating protesters with baseball bats and wagon spokes.

  3. Strike leaders—mostly British, but also a few Russian Jewish immigrants—were arrested and imprisoned. Workers gained little as a direct result of their walking off the job. But several strike leaders were elected, from jail, to the Manitoba legislature, and R.B. Russell High School and the provincial Wordsworth building are named after them today.

  4. The General Strike left a legacy of bitterness and controversy among organized labour groups across Canada. It sparked a wave of increased unionism and militancy, and sympathetic strikes erupted in centres from Amherst, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia.

  5. Around the same time as this labour unrest was occurring, the Canadian government was removi
ng thousands of Aboriginal children from their rural homes and placing them in distant boarding schools, often against their families’ will. In order to train the children to become productive members of European Christian society, their native language, dress, and culture were forbidden. Many suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of their teachers and caregivers.

  * * *

  Never got found, never got found, never got found.

  Some glass breaks down on the street, and then you stick your head in the door.

  “You all right? Why you up? You have trouble breathing?”

  I must’ve made a noise, cried out, god knows why, because it’s the same every night, the beer bottles, or the barking, or the sirens, waking me up in the middle of god knows when. It’s always the same now, woken up by the slightest little thing, like a cat, always dozing, always waking up.

  This time, though, I’m all the way up, in the olive green chair by the window.

  “Why you not in bed?”

  Go away, it’s not your business, I want to say, but I hold my tongue. How did I get into the green chair?

  “You gave us a scare before,” you say, still in the doorway. “You go out that door, wander away, what if we can’t find you? What you thinking? Huh?”

  I remember now. I could feel your hands, your little brown hands, no bigger than a child’s, shaking as you led me back, gripping hard with those little fingers.

  Back in the room, you’d put on the television, filled a foot basin with hot water.

  “See? It’s your favourite,” you’d said. “Cops and robbers. That one there, in the toque, he looks like bad news.”

  You’d fidgeted with your little necklace the way you always do when you don’t know what to do next, but this time it had reminded me of something. Never got found, my mind kept repeating, never got found, never got found.

  I’d seen something out there in the dark. But what was it? Someone was crying maybe, but who?

  Now, in the middle of the night, all I know is that you won’t leave until I say something, let you know I haven’t died on your watch.

  “I’m fine. This housecoat is warm. I’m fine here.”

  You don’t go away, just stand in the doorway fidgeting, moving the silly little cross back and forth along the chain. You think I don’t know how to look after myself? Not like you, I was born in this crazy place. You who come from some island where there are probably palm trees and bananas, you think you know what cold is? On the day I was born, sixty, seventy, maybe eighty years before you, who can tell with you people, the sod walls were completely iced in, five, ten, twenty feet of snow and the midwife couldn’t come and there wasn’t enough kindling and I was so small and feeble, like a runt pup, and so Mamo and Papo and Johnny all got close on the bed and tried to keep me warm without suffocating me right there. “Oi, you were shrivelled like a prune as if from the cold,” Mamo said, “but the Virgin looked down on us.”

  When you sigh, still fidgeting and not going away, I want to throw something. How long has it been since I’ve wanted to throw something? You think this is hard work, I want to say, following old people around? I’ve scrubbed toilets for a family with seven children, five nearly fully grown and still living in their parents’ house, I’ve stood sorting eggs, who can count how many, until the cold seeped into my joints and I never moved the same again, but you have not known work until you’ve farmed the prairie from nothing, with nothing but your bare hands. All my childhood I was stooped over. What do you know about such things?

  You shrug, like maybe you’ve heard what I’m thinking.

  “You need something, you let me know then.”

  As soon as you’re gone, the anger dies away, just like that. I hated the work, hated all of it, in the fields, in the houses, in the factories. Who am I to begrudge little brown you who cuts my toenails with such care?

  I reach into my pocket for a peppermint, and wait for the words to come back. At first, there’s only a siren somewhere and my own sucking noise and the whir, whir, whir. It’s so hot outside, but whir, whir, whir, always whir, whir, whir, and it’s cool in here—almost too cool.

  Never got found, never got found, never got found.

  This time, I’m back on the farm, clearing the roots and the rocks, cleaning the ashes from the oven, spreading hay over the shit.

  I’m standing with my underwear and hairbrush and some sauerkraut buns wrapped in a kerchief. I’m not thinking about being on the noisy train for the first time. I’m not thinking about the big city with the strange Indian name. I’m not thinking about missing this place where the Indians laugh at you while you stoop, laugh as they go by on their brown-and-white-spotted horses, with their funny boots and blankets and babies tied to their backs.

  I’m thinking about what I’ve heard, that some hired girls in the city have their own room, with a bed, and a cupboard, and even a lamp.

  Papo is outside, stooping to dig or pull or skin something. Mamo is acting funny, walking back and forth across the new wooden floor, like she doesn’t trust it yet and needs to keep trying it out. It’s hot and sticky outside, not even a breeze, and the room is filled with steam and the bubble of boiling tomatoes.

  “You work hard,” Mamo says. “You work hard, Tatia. You work hard and I’m sure Christ will reward you.”

  I can smell the buns in my bundle and want to eat one now, but they’re for later. “Yes, Mamo.”

  Then Mamo stops and grabs a jar of stewed tomatoes from the table. “You take this, for later.”

  I take the jar and hold it out in front of me. Mamo is acting funny and I don’t know what to do with the tomatoes, so I put them back. “It might break.”

  Mamo turns away and gets her Bible, in the corner by the icons where it always is, and holds it in her hands. “Fine,” she says. Then she puts the Bible back and starts stirring over the pots. “You do as you like. You’re old now.”

  “The jar,” I say. “It could break on the train.”

  But she doesn’t turn around and I’m already walking, Johnny and Lasia and Terry and Tanya already stopped waving, when she comes from behind, wiping her sweaty face with her apron. “You take this.”

  It’s the tiny crucifix that she wears around her neck, the one all her babies pull at and get slapped over. She’s looking at the ground, and the sweat is dripping off her chin, and I think she might be crying, but Mamo never cries.

  Three different times, three different baby boys, she’d said to Papo, with no tears. “The Blessed Virgin accepted her son’s death, and you, Petro, must accept your son is with Him.”

  “Be good, Tatia,” sweaty Mamo says. “Christ be with you.”

  I walk away to the station, until my heels feel as if they’re being stuck with pins, until I am as sweaty as Mamo, until there’s nothing left but road and the words sounding in my head.

  Never got found, never got found, never got found.

  These were the first. Like a nagging song that stays in your head, the words would repeat over and over and over again, steady and relentless. I used to know what these first ones meant, but am no longer sure. It’s the same as earlier, outside, I can remember the crying, but that’s all.

  “He was crying,” I told you.

  But you just stuck my feet in the basin, turned up the television. “You just worry about yourself,” you said. “You get up on your own, you can fall down. Your grandchildren come here to see how you’re doing and what we tell them?”

  I’ve marched these streets, I wanted to say. I knew these streets before the businesses closed and the hoodlums took over. One great-granddaughter calls it “the core area” with her nose turned up, but I know these streets better than anyone.

  But it may be a lie. When the younger ones come, the great-grandchildren, they look familiar but I can’t get at their names. I know there are a few great-greats, probably still in diapers, because they wear them until they are walking and talking these days. All of them, they blur togeth
er like the bottom rows of an eye chart. I look out the window and it’s the same, familiar, but so different that I look away.

  I don’t care, I wanted to say. Those grandchildren know no more than you do.

  Now, you with your fidgety little hands wouldn’t believe the words that are coming to me, coming from so far away and yet closer than ever. It seems I only have to sit in this olive green chair in the middle of the night and listen.

  140 Montrose, 140 Montrose, 140 Montrose.

  I’m carefully ironing Mrs. Sullivan’s tea towels, white with little mauve flowers, folding first in halves, then in quarters. I’m shaking the feather pillows into pale yellow cases, careful not to catch the silk with my rough skin. I’m walking to mass in my new muskrat coat, flushed hot from the long trolley ride across town.

  After Montrose Street, everything here on these streets seems ugly and worn, the people, the sidewalks, the houses. It smells, and I’m starting to smell too, just being here in the muskrat. Since when is it so warm in February?

  140 Montrose, 140 Montrose, 140 Montrose.

  I step around the melting piles of dog shit, there’s no escaping the shit, going as fast as I can, sure to be late, and then smack, there’s nothing but pain behind my ear.

  A voice shouts from behind and I turn. How long has it been since I’ve heard my language? How long since I’ve sent any money back home?

  “You, what’s your name? A man is stepping right in the puddles, splashing his pant legs as he goes. “You, your name.”

  “Tatia,” I start to say, but then remember. “Tilly.”

  When he stops, he is close enough to touch and breathing hard. He’s wearing a light shirt, open at the neck. “Well, Tatia-Tilly, let me tell you, you look like a bourgeois in that thing. That’s why they threw the snowball.” He clears his throat, spits into the slush. “Still, they shouldn’t have thrown it. Eh?”

  He’s speaking my language, but I don’t really understand.

  “Tell me, Tatia. Do you live around here?”

  Even though I’m hot, I turn up the collar of my coat. I speak in English.